MoMA: A Campaign for the Well-being of Art.
For this case, we were told to make up our own assignment. So we didn't receive a brief, but created our own. My dear friend Evelina, also a copywriter, and I were inspired by a Twitter post that spoke about a new technology called "Nightshade".
"Nightshade" is a technology that is injected into .Webp, .jpeg, and .png file formats, and is invisible to the human eye. It essentially corrupts the parsing of Artificial Intelligence, i.e., its analysis engine. This makes it impossible to take others' work, for example artists whose work is typically reused in other creations without permission.
With this inspiration, we investigated what people thought about artificial art. It varied greatly, as there were people who felt that "art had been democratized", while others felt that "artificial art is not art because there is nothing human behind it, let alone the problems with legality".
With this in mind, we chose to create a brief that involved the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) taking a stand against AI art. We felt this was appropriate as MoMA has of late expressed negative views about AI art. We call this campaign "By Artificial Intelligence".
"By Artificial Intelligence" is our anti-AI campaign, where we have chosen to use the weakness of artificial intelligence against itself. Since AI programs like Midjourney and Dall•E cannot create new things, as everything that is fed through is just remixed, we did just that. We took famous paintings from MoMA's collection and put them in Midjourney to be recreated. These images do not resemble the original at all, and we believe that those who are multicultural, especially in art, will be able to see which paintings the AI is trying to copy.
Then we put up posters in New York City (MoMA's hometown) that display these grotesque imitation attempts with copy that writes the title of the original artwork, but attributes it to "Artificial Intelligence", and a bit below it says "See the real thing, only at MoMA".
We have also written a post for their website about the use of AI, so-called "Our stance on Artificial Intelligence". It reads:
"We at the Museum of Modern Art care about the integrity of artists and cannot deny the predicament of creating with the help of artificial intelligence. The legal issues and the lack of regulations surrounding AI make it immoral for us to display any of this work. While artificial intelligence is exciting and creates incredible opportunities in many other fields, we at MoMA believe it does not belong in the world of artists."
Designs made by yours truly.
The Short Version:
Client: MoMA
Problem: AI Art is ruining the artspace for artists.
Insight: AI Art isn't capable of making dignified art, has multiple weaknesses but is most important of all, ethically and legally questionable.
Solution: An Anti-Campaign using AI's weaknesses against itself, drawing the public to MoMA's website where they can learn more about the impact AI art has on artists, the artspace and creativity in general.
Work by Tobias Andersson & Evelina Johannesson.
