The Best AI Art in the World, Vol. 1
This new Retro series—curated by a longtime professional cultural critic and former Digital Arts professor at University of New Hampshire—highlights amazing Artificial Intelligence-generated art.
{Note: This series features ten works of AI art at a time, offered in no particular order. To get a better sense of the perspective of the curator of this collection as to AI art, see this essay. The artwork names that appear below are either those attached to the work on its publication or, if no such title was provided, a close approximation of the prompt used to create the art as announced by its “algorithm DJ”—the individual who entered the text prompt that led to the artwork. The images below may come from any of the major AI-art apps, such as Midjourney, DALL-E 2 (built by OpenAI), Dream (built by WOMBO), Craiyon, or Stable Diffusion (built by Stability AI). The online source for each artwork, if known, is linked to below the artwork.}
Introduction
All of the artworks that appear below were created by artificial intelligence (“AI”).
These works are not copyrighted, are not reproductions of existing works, and were produced as a result of the artificial-intelligence protocols that devised them being “trained” on billions of publicly available images online. The same prompt used to generate the images below, reentered into the same protocol, would likely result in a different artwork—as would entering the same prompt into a different AI protocol (see the italicized note atop this article for a list of some of the popular AI-art apps you will see represented as this Retro series unfolds in the coming months and years).
Except where otherwise indicated, the pictures below are not intended to accurately depict any living or historical person or brand. Any resemblance of human figures to individuals presently alive is—again, except where otherwise indicated—coincidental.
None of these images have been digitally altered from their original publication, with the infrequent exception of cropping to remove inadvertent black or white bordering.
In those instances in which Retro offers a “series” of thematically and/or substantively linked AI-generated artworks, note that the series has been curated, meaning that not all of the artworks originally appearing in the series have been included here. As the aim of this series—as its title suggests—is to use curatorial journalism (as well as my years of experience as an art critic and digital studies professor) to provide for readers the best exemplars of AI art available (in the estimation of this author), and because AI-art apps for some time to come will occasionally produce sub-standard artifacts in response to a given prompt, this additional layer of curation is needed to maintain the high standards of both this series and Retro writ large.
{Note: On rare occasion, images that appear in this series may be unsettling to certain viewers. Any such upset is unintentional; these artworks are intended to surprise, delight, illuminate and amaze, not provoke negative emotions or physical responses. However, because any AI-generated product is definitionally already lodged deep in the “uncanny valley”, occasional strong reactions to the images in this series are to be expected.}
(1) “Time Period Selfies” (2023) [Series]
“Caveman Selfie”
“Legionnaire Selfie”
“Viking Selfie”
“Samurai Selfie”
“Pirate Selfie”
“Wild West Selfie”
“Indigenous Warrior Selfie”
“WWI Allied Trench Selfie”
[Source.]
(2) “Animals in Moshpits” (2023) [Series]
“Wolf”
“Grizzly Bear”
“Lion”
“Polar Bear”
“Gorillas”
“Elephant”
“Giant Walrus”
“Wild Boar”
[Source.]
(3) “Too Many Mushrooms” (2023)
[Source.]
(4) “Masks” (2023) [Series]
[Source.]
(5) “Cars” (2023) [Series]
[Source.]
(6) “We’re All Fine Here. Thanks.” (2023) [Series]
[Source.]
(7) “Untitled” (2023)
[Source.]
(8) “U.S. Presidents with Mullets” (2023) [Series]
“Joe Biden”
“Ronald Reagan”
“Bill Clinton”
“Gerald Ford”
“Barack Obama”
“Jimmy Carter”
[Source.]
(9) “GoPro Animal Selfies” (2023) [Series]
“Cheetahs”
“Monkeys”
“Ducks”
“Dogs”
“Horses”
“Cats”
“Pandas”
“Polar Bears”
[Source.]
(10) “Batman (dir. Wes Anderson)” (2023) [Series]
[Source.]