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Inside the Art Schools Building Courses Around A.I.’s Creative Potential

Many art educators see the integration of A.I. as a natural evolution of studio practice rather than a threat to traditional methods.

While no one can predict what the art of the future will look like, it seems increasingly clear that at least some of it will be created with the help of artificial intelligence. A growing number of visual arts programs at independent art colleges and universities now offer courses—and in some cases, entire degree programs—focused on advanced technology. These include Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita, the Cleveland Institute of Art & Design in Ohio, the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture Design at Indiana University in Bloomington, Parsons School of Design in Manhattan, the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. Students graduating from these and similar programs are unlikely to abandon what they’ve learned once they leave school.

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What exactly are they being taught? Rick Dakan, chair of the Emerging Technology Committee at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, described artists who make “digital images with complex workflows that incorporate A.I. tools in their multi-step process. They start with a hand-drawn sketch or drawing, put that in A.I. to get a more detailed color rendering, take that back out and paint over it in Photoshop or Illustrator”—image editing software first developed in the 1980s—“then take that image and use an A.I. tool to make a three-dimensional rendering of it and print a model with a 3-D printer.”

Caleb Weintraub, director of the Eskenazi Technology and Innovation Lab in the School of Art, Architecture Design at Indiana University, described one of his own creations, a project called “Speculative Portraiture,” in which “a voice becomes a picture. The finished works are hand-painted portraits on panel, not prints or screen outputs.” He works with A.I.-generated voices—sometimes his own or those of consenting colleagues and family members—to explore what human head images are produced when different vocal features are fed into an A.I. program. “I then make a series of gesture drawings using the images as references, as if encountering the same person in different moments.”

Tom Leeser, founding director........

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