👩‍🎨 How AI Became Apostles of Surrealism?

Dalí, Magritte, and Miró brought immortal fame to surrealism, and now DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion are securing global dominance.

AI and surrealism have surprisingly much in common. The main connection lies in the idea of the unconscious. Surrealist artists aimed to liberate the "real movement of thought." Similarly, gen AI creates images based on massive collections of human-created artworks, yielding results that frequently appear weird and nonsensical, similar to surrealist visions.

ℹ At the core of surrealism, literally "beyond realism," is an interest in exploring the subconscious, irrational, and fantastical. André Breton, the movement's founder, wrote a manifesto in 1924 proclaiming its key principle: automatism, or "stream of consciousness writing," which implies refraining from editing oneself in texts.

🎨 Surrealist artists also began applying this approach. According to digital culture and new media theorist Lev Manovich, AI tools enable the creation of essential surrealism.

How does this work?

AI is based on algorithms that partially mimic the workings of the human brain.

As a result, it can produce images that are both improbable and realistic, blurring the line between reality and fantasy — the main goal of surrealism.

Although the ability to achieve a specific result from a model through precise prompts is a key skill of prompt engineers when working with generative AI, predicting the result of generation with 100% accuracy is impossible; otherwise, the concept of "AI hallucinations" would not exist.

— Critic Maria Kuvshinova.

@hiaimediaen