To be or not to be a neuro-artist?

On October 12, an exhibition titled BLUE LARD opened in Berlin, with artworks created using AI. The exhibition, dedicated to the famous novel by writer Vladimir Sorokin, was prepared with the participation of prompt engineer Evgeny Nikitin, however, his name was not mentioned in the announcements. This incident sparked a flurry of discussions in the art community and became a basis for debates on copyright in the era of AI.

A prompt-engineer or neuro-artist is a person who creates images using neural networks.

Evgeny Nikitin explains the essence of the new profession: "A prompt engineer is a specialist capable of achieving the desired result from an image-generating neural network. At this stage, neural networks cannot understand complex queries with a lot of input data, they draw nonsense, poorly correlating with the query. Especially if there is more than one object in the image — different characters in one picture, etc. Therefore, the art of prompting was born: such work with the query language that, after many dozens of iterations, results in what the client intended."

Here, for instance, is one of the tasks that Vladimir Sorokin set for the BLUE LARD exhibition: "The interior of a bedroom, a disheveled bed, a slim young bisexual man of the future with a metallic cheekbone, bald, beautiful, topless, sits in front of a mirror, a servant in a white or gray coat resembling Stalin, drapes a cloak made of pieces of blue lard over his shoulders." What resulted is the first illustration of the post.

At the moment, the most expensive sold painting created by AI is considered to be Portrait of Edmond de Belamy. It was auctioned off for $432,500. Christie’s became the first auction house to offer a lot created by AI. The painting depicts a man in a dark frock coat with a white collar, his facial features are blurred. Instead of a signature, there's a mathematical formula. The AI that created the painting was developed by a team of students from France.

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