Art made by artificial intelligence is developing a style of its own

First prize in the creative category of this year’s Sony World Photography Awards was presented in April to Boris Eldagsen, who impressed judges with his ethereal, vintage-style portrait of two women in black and white. Mr Eldagsen, however, turned down the prize and revealed that his image had been created not by a camera but by artificial intelligence (AI). The German artist said he had “applied as a cheeky monkey”, to see if he could fool the panel.

“Generative” AI models make convincing mimics, whether they are producing vintage portraits or more modern images—like a purported photo of the pope in an improbable Balenciaga puffer jacket, which recently tricked half of Twitter. Yet their ability to produce original work is less clear. “AI art has so far been exceptionally trivial,” a columnist in the Art Newspaper recently huffed. It is intrinsically derivative, based on the millions of training images that are consumed, digested and regurgitated to order. “Plagiarism is a feature of the AI process,” declared the Writers Guild of America, one of many creative-workers’ unions that sees generative AI models as mere copycats.