Reading list #

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the creative landscape, challenging traditional artistic processes, and raising critical questions about authorship, ethics, power centralization and cultural impact. As AI-based technologies are increasingly integrated into artistic practice and society at large, it’s essential to understand their implications in order to give constructive criticism, know where their benefit lies, and propose alternatives.

This reading list brings together academic and non-academic publications at the intersection of AI, Art, and Society. We aim these resources as a means of keeping informed on research and thinking on the subject. The list is not exhaustive and but it is intended to be representative. Whether you’re an artist, researcher, or curious observer, we invite you to explore this collection and engage with the ongoing discourse on creativity and narratives in the age of AI.

AI practice in the Arts
(Critical) Analysis of AI in the Arts
Ethics and Politics of AI in the Arts
AI narratives

Resources illustration

Studying the practice of AI in the arts #

AI is sometimes seen as a tool, medium or material used in the creative process. Artists have developed a practice of this tool, medium or material over a long period of time. The study of these practices helps us to understand the capabilities of these technologies, to demystify them, and to imagine more appropriate support systems for creation. Here we report on studies that have focused on this question of practices, mainly in the field of Human-Computer Interaction.

Akten, M. (2021). Deep Visual Instruments: Realtime Continuous, Meaningful Human Control over Deep Neural Networks for Creative Expression [PhD Thesis]. Goldsmiths, University of London.

Bird, C. (2024). Artists and AI: Creative Interactions and Tensions. Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3651041

Caramiaux, B., & Donnarumma, M. (2021). Artificial Intelligence in Music and Performance: A Subjective Art-Research Inquiry. In E. R. Miranda (Ed.), Handbook of Artificial Intelligence for Music (pp. 75–95). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72116-9_4

Caramiaux, B., & Fdili Alaoui, S. (2022). ‘Explorers of Unknown Planets’: Practices and Politics of Artificial Intelligence in Visual Arts. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(CSCW2), 477:1-477:24. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555578

Chang, M., Druga, S., Fiannaca, A. J., Vergani, P., Kulkarni, C., Cai, C. J., & Terry, M. (2023). The Prompt Artists. Creativity and Cognition, 75–87. https://doi.org/10.1145/3591196.3593515

Choi, S. K., & DiPaola, S. (2023). AI as other: An art-as-research approach to generative AI art practice. Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC).

Rajcic, N., Llano Rodriguez, M. T., & McCormack, J. (2024). Towards a Diffractive Analysis of Prompt-Based Generative AI. Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3641971

Sanchez, T. (2023). Examining the Text-to-Image Community of Practice: Why and How do People Prompt Generative AIs? Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Creativity and Cognition, 43–61. https://doi.org/10.1145/3591196.3593051

Shelby, R., Srinivasan, R., Burgdorf, K., Lena, J. C., & Rostamzadeh, N. (2024). Creative ML Assemblages: The Interactive Politics of People, Processes, and Products. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 8(CSCW1), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1145/3637315

Sivertsen, C., Salimbeni, G., Løvlie, A. S., Benford, S. D., & Zhu, J. (2024). Machine Learning Processes As Sources of Ambiguity: Insights from AI Art. Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642855

(Critical) Analysis of AI in the Arts #

Browne, K. (2022). Who (or What) Is an AI Artist? Leonardo, 55(2), 130–134. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02092

Daniele, A., & Song, Y.-Z. (2019). Ai+ art= human. Proceedings of the 2019 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 155–161.

Donnarumma, M. (2023). Against the Norm. Digital Culture & Society (DCS): Vol 8, Issue 2/2022-Algorithmic Art, 15, 39.

Epstein, Z., Hertzmann, A., Herman, L., Mahari, R., Frank, M. R., Groh, M., Schroeder, H., Smith, A., Akten, M., Fjeld, J., Farid, H., Leach, N., Pentland, A., & Russakovsky, O. (2023). Art and the science of generative AI: A deeper dive. Science, 380(6650), 1110–1111. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adh4451

Hemment, D., Currie, M., Bennett, S., Elwes, J., Ridler, A., Sinders, C., Vidmar, M., Hill, R., & Warner, H. (2023). AI in the Public Eye: Investigating Public AI Literacy Through AI Art. Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 931–942. https://doi.org/10.1145/3593013.3594052

Hertzmann, A. (2018). Can computers create art? Arts, 7(2), 18. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/7/2/18

Kawakami, R., & Venkatagiri, S. (2024). The Impact of Generative AI on Artists. Creativity and Cognition, 79–82. https://doi.org/10.1145/3635636.3664263

Manovich, L. (2018). AI Aesthetics. Strelka press.

McCormack, J., Cruz Gambardella, C., Rajcic, N., Krol, S. J., Llano, M. T., & Yang, M. (2023). Is Writing Prompts Really Making Art? In C. Johnson, N. Rodríguez-Fernández, & S. M. Rebelo (Eds.), Artificial Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (Vol. 13988, pp. 196–211). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29956-8_13

Park, S. (2024). The work of art in the age of generative AI: Aura, liberation, and democratization. AI & SOCIETY. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-01948-6

Ethics and Politics of AI in the Arts #

Jiang, H. H., Brown, L., Cheng, J., Khan, M., Gupta, A., Workman, D., Hanna, A., Flowers, J., & Gebru, T. (2023). AI Art and its Impact on Artists. Proceedings of the 2023 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 363–374. https://doi.org/10.1145/3600211.3604681

Lovato, J., Zimmerman, J., Smith, I., Dodds, P., & Karson, J. (2024). Foregrounding Artist Opinions: A Survey Study on Transparency, Ownership, and Fairness in AI Generative Art. arXiv Preprint arXiv:2401.15497. https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.15497

Stark, L., & Crawford, K. (2019). The work of art in the age of artificial intelligence: What artists can teach us about the ethics of data practice. Surveillance & Society, 17(3/4), 442–455.

Vyas, B. (n.d.). Ethical Implications of Generative AI in Art and the Media.

Zapata, S. (2022). The End of Art: An Argument Against Image AIs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjSxFAGP9Ss

Zapata, S. (2023). Who Makes the Art in Utopia? TedxBerkeley. https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxNwkkN9SnPpSJlnbkDK4q-NgxnaAyPHLL

AI Narratives #

Campolo, A., & Crawford, K. (2020). Enchanted determinism: Power without responsibility in artificial intelligence. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society. https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/6022?v=pdf

Cave, S., & Dihal, K. (2019). Hopes and fears for intelligent machines in fiction and reality. Nature Machine Intelligence, 1(2), 74–78.

Cave, S., & Dihal, K. (2020). The Whiteness of AI. Philosophy & Technology, 33(4), 685–703. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00415-6

Cave, S., Dihal, K., & Dillon, S. (2020). AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines. Oxford University Press. https://academic.oup.com/book/36637?login=false

Chubb, J., Reed, D., & Cowling, P. (2024). Expert views about missing AI narratives: Is there an AI story crisis? AI & SOCIETY, 39(3), 1107–1126. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01548-2

Fast, E., & Horvitz, E. (2017). Long-term trends in the public perception of artificial intelligence. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 31(1). https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/10635

Gebru, T. (2024, November). The changing naming convention in service of increasing AI Hype. Linkedin. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7255381872434720769/

Hermann, I. (2020). Beware of fictional AI narratives. Nature Machine Intelligence, 2(11), 654–654. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-020-00256-0

Hermann, I. (2023). Artificial intelligence in fiction: Between narratives and metaphors. AI & SOCIETY, 38(1), 319–329. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01299-6

Kelley, P. G., Yang, Y., Heldreth, C., Moessner, C., Sedley, A., Kramm, A., Newman, D. T., & Woodruff, A. (2021). Exciting, Useful, Worrying, Futuristic: Public Perception of Artificial Intelligence in 8 Countries. Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 627–637. https://doi.org/10.1145/3461702.3462605

Salvaggio, E. (2020, August 29). Challenging The Myths of Generative AI. TechPolicy.Press. https://www.techpolicy.press/challenging-the-myths-of-generative-ai/

Ytre-Arne, B., & Moe, H. (2021). Folk theories of algorithms: Understanding digital irritation. Media, Culture & Society, 43(5), 807–824. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720972314

Contributing #

For any missing resource, please let us know in contacting us.