Aeon Video

What does it mean to make art in the age of inexhaustible AIs? An animator ponders his purpose and reclaims some control. Read more about 'The Diffusion Pilot' on Aeon: https://aeon.co/videos/an-animator-ponders-his-purpose-amid-an-ais-infinite-possibilities

Director: Aurelijus Čiupas (https://vimeo.com/aulerius)

The Lithuanian artist and animator Aurelijus Čiupas’s work simultaneously uses and interrogates new media technologies, including generative image neural network models – a form of AI. In his short film The Diffusion Pilot, Čiupas contemplates his place as a conjurer of images amid the rise of AI models with seemingly infinite and inexhaustible capacities for image creation.

In this somewhat cryptic tale, told through surreal, often transfixing AI imagery and very few words, Čiupas splits the work into two distinct halves. In the first, he is overwhelmed by the AI’s possibilities, as a flurry of rich, painterly moving images morph seamlessly into one another. In the second, feeling as though his own work has perhaps been eclipsed by the technology, he reimposes control by limiting the AI’s power, resulting in darkened, vaguely haunted moving images that evoke the haziness of memory. Neither a celebration nor a condemnation of AI image generation, Čiupas’s piece is instead a thoughtful reflection on artistic control and authorship amid the technology’s rapid rise.

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AI art, generative neural networks, digital memory, philosophy of technology, artificial dementia, human-AI collaboration, diffusion models, latent space, The Diffusion Pilot, infinite memory vs. human decay, the role of the artist, technological evolution, creative control.