It has some very fierce critics, but AI art is now big business in top auction houses and museums

When you think about the way art is created, you might imagine painters, photographers, or sculptors immersed in their work at their studios. But what about a person sitting in front of a computer screen using artificial intelligence and data to create visuals. Is that art? It’s a question that is being asked, and answered, by some of the most prestigious museums, critics, and auction houses in the world. Some artists call AI a “revolutionary new medium.” Others call it “theft.” We wanted to see it for ourselves, so we went to Los Angeles to meet Refik Anadol. The 40-year-old Turkish American artist is considered a pioneer in the world of AI art. If you’re wondering what that world looks like, grab your Dramamine.

Refik Anadol invited us inside this space at his L.A. studio. Every image that surrounds us, Anadol created using artificial intelligence.

We’ll get to exactly how he created it in a moment. But first, take it in. A hypnotic flow of shapes and colors that morph and evolve in the mirrors and led screens that surround us. It can make you feel like Alice in Wonderland stumbled into Studio 54.

All of this while a device around your neck pumps out different AI-generated scents, such as rain and flowers, to accompany what you’re seeing. Anadol says eventually another device will monitor viewers vital statistics, such as heartbeat, and that data will be used to change the art in real time.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Is this a party trick?

Refik Anadol: I don’t think so. I feel like it’s a new form of art. Like we are discovering a new place that we’ve never been before.

If that all sounds a bit out there, consider the planetary scale of Refik Anadol’s work. His massive, mind-bending images have been stretched across the Sphere in Las Vegas, the facade of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and Antonio Gaudi’s Casa Batlló in Barcelona.

Sharyn Alfonsi: When people ask you what you do, what do you say?

Refik Anadol: So I’m a media artist and I am using data and AI– in my work. So more than 16 years I paint with a thinking brush.

Sharyn Alfonsi: What’s a thinking brush?

Refik Anadol: I believe that information around us, data around us, has– has its own voice.

Sharyn Alfonsi: But like painting, drawing, the things we traditionally think of, sculpting–

Refik Anadol: So–

Sharyn Alfonsi: –do you do any of those things?

Refik Anadol: I think in my mind’s eye– so technically I may not draw well…not but I– in my mind’s eye I can compute, I can imagine geometrically what exactly the mind’s eye is looking for.

To create art, Anadol uses data, lots of it. For this piece, he used 200 million photos of Earth. Data from NASA was the driving force behind these exhibits.

Refik Anadol: When I think about data as a pigment, I think it doesn’t need to dry. It can move in any shape, in any form, any color, and texture.

Sharyn Alfonsi: It sounds a little trippy.

Refik Anadol: It is trippy because I think as artists we ask what is beyond reality.

To show us how he does that, Anadol grabbed a gaming controller.

Refik Anadol: So we are in this– a new algorithm that I am literally controlling the whole system.

Anadol says his team curated 153 million images for a piece on California landscapes.

Each image is converted into a series of data points that represents its characteristics such as color, texture and shape. They’re then plotted into multi-dimensional space. That data is what the AI learns from. So when it receives a prompt, it can create its own, new version, images Anadol says only, quote, “exist in the mind of a machine.”

Sharyn Alfonsi: This isn’t a real place?

Refik Anadol: This is not. This is AI dreaming this world. And now we are reshaping this world together.

Anadol then applies special algorithms to blend and make the images into his signature fluid style.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Are you a computer programmer or are you an artist?

Refik Anadol: I am an artist but I love computers. But now with AI I feel like I have now program it in a way that I never imagine before.

Sharyn Alfonsi: How much of this is driven by you and how much by the machine?

Refik Anadol: So this is a great question because I try my very best last 10 years to make it 50% machine, 50% human.

Treating AI as a co-creator has made Refik Anadol a darling of the tech world. He’s teamed up with Google, MIT and Microsoft to create large, public installations.

He’s been embraced by some in the art world, selling his pieces for upwards of a million dollars at auction. His work has been exhibited at museums around the world. And in 2022, the Museum of Modern Art in New York commissioned this piece: a colossal 24-foot-high installation that filled the MoMA lobby called “Unsupervised.”

Sharyn Alfonsi: How did the public react to “Unsupervised” when they came in and saw it?

Glenn Lowry: It was a utter extraordinary—hit. People sat in front of it for hours literally transfixed by what they were seeing.

Glenn Lowry was the director of the MoMA for three decades. He retired in September. To create “Unsupervised,” Lowry told us Refik Anadol trained an AI system on the publicly available metadata of the entire MoMA collection. Think of metadata as the digital DNA of each piece, it describes and identifies the art. Anadol used MoMA’s metadata to reimagine 200 years of art.

Glenn Lowry: He wrote some algorithms that allowed the data from one object to evolve into the data of another object to become yet a third object or a fourth object never before seen. And I think people found it deeply satisfying.

Studies have found that typically, museum visitors spend about 28 seconds looking at great works of art. For “Unsupervised,” Anadol says it was 38 minutes. But not everyone was quite so enamored.

Jerry Saltz: It’s like a giant lava lamp that you can’t take your eyes off of.

Jerry Saltz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic for New York Magazine. He called “Unsupervised” a half million dollar screensaver.

Sharyn Alfonsi: When people came in the– and they looked at this, they looked at it for 38 minutes. Isn’t that the sign of success?

Jerry Saltz: Popularity is not the sign of success. How long you spend with a work of art is not a sign of success so much as your willingness to get quiet within yourself, go to uncomfortable places, become comfortable in those places, asking yourself questions. In front of a Refik Adanol, you sit down, go into a stupor, and you don’t have to think much. You go, “Oh, there goes a painting that looks a little like Renoir, morphing into one that looks like Picasso, morphing into an amoeba.”

Sharyn Alfonsi: …It’s something to look at….Is it art?

Jerry Saltz: AI is art. AI will be art.

But, Saltz says, AI has a long way to go.

Jerry Saltz: AI is one day old. And we’re already having conversations, “I hate it, you love it. It’s good, it’s bad. It’s new, it’s young.” Most of what you see in AI, Sharyn, is crap.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Crap?

Jerry Saltz: 90% crap. But 90% of the art made during the Renaissance was also crap. Things take time.

Glenn Lowry: I think one has to recognize that works of art that challenge you– are always going to be misunderstood by many at first.

MoMA’s Glenn Lowry says the skepticism around AI mirrors the reaction to the advent of photography 200 years ago.

Glenn Lowry: When suddenly the human hand is removed from the making of an image, what does that mean? And I think artificial intelligence is analogous to that. But I don’t think you can stop technology.

Molly Crabapple is a New York-based artist and author. She does not think AI should be welcomed into the art world.

Sharyn Alfonsi: You’ve called this the greatest art heist in history.

Molly Crabapple: Yes.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Why?

Molly Crabapple: Well, when we talk about art heists typically, we’re talking about one painting being taken from a museum, two, three. They stole billions and billions of images.

Crabapple says museums, galleries and auction houses shouldn’t buy or display AI art trained on other artists’ work without their consent. She calls the popular AI art generators like this — which let users type in a prompt to create striking, sometimes surreal images — “corporate plagiarism bots.” She says they’re trained on art scraped from the web, including hers. This is an illustration Crabapple did of Aleppo, Syria. When we asked an AI image generator to create a drawing of a Syrian skyline in the style of Molly Crabapple, it made this in seconds – stinkingly similar.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Did anyone ever ask you, “Hey, can we feed your images into this system?

Molly Crabapple: Certainly not. No artist has been asked for their consent. No artist has received compensation. In fact, we don’t even see credit.

The AI companies have told lawmakers that what they are doing falls under fair use, a legal doctrine which allows copyrighted works to be used without permission under certain circumstances. They claim AI is studying and learning, just like a human would. But a group of artists has filed a class action lawsuit against four of the AI companies that make art generators accusing them of copyright infringement, among other things.

Sharyn Alfonsi: There are some artists that have called using these images theft. What do you say to that?

Refik Anadol: I completely agree all my artist friends. I know what they mean, and as an artist I only use my own data.

Refik Anadol told us since 2020, he’s only worked with what he calls “ethically sourced” datasets.

Sharyn Alfonsi: What do you mean by that?

Refik Anadol: So this is the most important part of art making with AI. It takes a lot of teamwork, a lot of thinking, research. We always start with permission, then we know exactly where information comes from.

Now, Anadol is building a 20,000 square foot museum dedicated to “AI arts” in downtown Los Angeles, called DATALAND, a massive canvas to celebrate his optimism about technology. Anadol insists AI is not a threat, but a tool to create art no human could create alone.

Sharyn Alfonsi: There are some people that say AI can never truly create art ’cause it lacks emotion, it lacks lived experience, and it lacks intent.

Refik Anadol: Yes. These are all I think true. That’s why I believe, human-machine collaboration. We are really completing that bridge where I feel like most likely where we are going as humanity, and just be sure that it’s done right, that it’s shared right, and celebrate this new age of imagination.

Produced by Michael Baltierra. Associate producers, Erin DuCharme and Chrissy Hallowell. Edited by Craig Crawford.