The Best AI Art in the World, Vol. 5
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 Retro series features ten works of AI art in each volume—in some cases, series of such artworks—offered in no particular order. To get a sense of the perspective of the curator of this collection with respect to AI art, see this essay. The artwork names that appear below are those that were attached to the work upon its publication, or, if no such title was provided, an approximation of the prompt used to create the art as announced by its “algo jockey”/“AJ”: the individual who crafted the text prompt that produced the artwork. The images below hail from major AI-art apps such as Midjourney, DALL-E 2 (built by OpenAI), Craiyon, Dream (built by WOMBO), or Stable Diffusion (built by Stability AI). The source for each artwork, if known, is linked to immediately following each artwork or series of artworks. AJs who would prefer not to have their work appear in this series can request the removal of a work via DM.}
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 after being “trained” on billions of publicly available images online. A prompt similar to the one used to generate the images below, reentered into the same protocol, would likely result in a different work—as would entering the same prompt into a different AI protocol (see the 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 elide (a) inadvertent bordering, or (b) branding that distracts from the artwork and is unnecessary given that the source of each work (as noted in the italicized text above) is linked to below each work or series of works.
In those instances in which Retro offers a “series” of thematically and/or substantively linked AI-generated artworks, please 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 procedures undergirding this series involve using curatorial journalism (and my years of experience as an art critic and digital studies professor) to offer readers the best exemplars of AI art available in the estimation of this author, and because AI-art apps will for some time to come occasionally produce substandard artifacts in reply to a given prompt, this additional layer of curation is necessary to maintain the high standards of both this series and Retro writ large.
The overarching purpose of this new Retro series is not just to demonstrate the quite startling range of contemporary AI-art apps’ generative capacity—that is, to celebrate and honor the works that appear in it by attaching to them the breathless superlative that gives this series its name—but also to offer a quick-link to the “algo jockey” who crafted the input that produced each image. As noted above, if any such “AJ” wishes to have Retro take down a particular work, Retro is happy to do so and do so promptly.
The Evolution of AI Art
One thing readers must keep in mind as they follow this series is that AI art is getting better by the day—quite literally. Retro expects that as the major AI-art apps continue training themselves on publicly available images and the thousands and thousands of new text prompts they’re getting daily, we will not only see algo jockeys becoming more and more talented at what they do (and there are already some clear superstars in the space, whose oeuvre instantly ends the notion anyone can produce superlative AI art without a deep understanding of the tools now available for making it) but we will also start to see these apps’ protocols learn how to better respond to text prompts.
So while it’s tempting to treat AI art as a static concept, we must not. It’s a moving target that may well look very, very different in 2024 and 2025 than it did in early 2023.
{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. Certain images are prefaced by a “curator’s note” that briefly explains why I find this particular work to be of artistic merit.}
(1) “Masks” (2023) [Series]
