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DECEMBER 15, 2024 PITTSBURGH, PA

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ART DAILY

The Robots are Coming for our

Creativity “the next
generation of art is
By Edward Li coming, and there’s
nothing we can do

P ittsburgh is not exactly a town you might think of as a thriving

to stop it”

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DECEMBER 15, 2024 PITTSBURGH, PA

community for art. Yet an art exhibition at Carnegie Mellon

University last Tuesday attracted hundreds of art critics, Art at The
artists, and even tech enthusiasts. But this exhibition was
not any normal art exhibition. It was The Magenta
Magenta
Collection, the first-of-its kind art show with every piece of Collection
art custom-generated for each person, for the sole purpose of
satisfying the needs of the consumer.

If you were one of the attendees at The Magenta Collection,

you might have been confused as you were waiting in line for
the exhibition, seeing people roaming around in an empty
ballroom, wearing high-tech augmented reality glasses,
seemingly staring at a very concentrated spot of nothing on
the walls. On the other side of the hall, a continuous hum
could be heard from the many robot painting machines,
painting “original works” that someone in the exhibition
liked. And people did seem to like the exhibition. Shalin
Patel, an undergraduate at Brown University who is
interested in technology but new in art, said that this was the
“first art exhibition I’ve really connected to”. Patel’s words
seem like The Magenta Collection has done a perfect job of
its mission statement - to connect everyone to art.

T alk to Ian Goodfellow, the co-founder and Chief Creative

Officer of the Magenta Foundation, and you hear the same

story of techno-optimism. We met Goodfellow at the
headquarters of the Magenta Foundation, located in a
nondescript warehouse in the Strip District of Pittsburgh. He
stepped out of his driverless Tesla to greet us, wearing an e- A few examples of some
ink shirt with a dynamic pattern that seemed vaguely of the art pieces generated
inspired by some type of Cubist art, perhaps that of Picabia. at The Magenta Collection.
These pieces of art seem
When asked about the origin of his shirt design, Goodfellow
to be in the style of
simply responded, “it’s made by our AI”.
Francis Picabia, although
Goodfellow took us inside the warehouse, past the hum of hints of other cubist artists
the machine shop still painting orders from last week’s can be found, mixed in the
exhibition. Clusters of workers were arranged in hexagonal combined style of each art
piece.
pods, among them what Goodfellow calls their “art
curators”, workers that labored to scrape images of artwork

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DECEMBER 15, 2024 PITTSBURGH, PA

from websites or even labeling individual brushstrokes on paintings to improve the realism
of the painting robots the Magenta Foundation is rapidly scaling. In the back, a microkitchen
framed a quote on the wall, “Bring Art to Everyone”.

Ian claims that everything the Magenta Foundation does centers

Make art
around these few words - the goal to make art accessible and
accessible and
connectible for everyone. Ian claims that “an integral part of our
connectible for
humanity is our ability to admire something, inspect it, make it
everyone
meaningful. Art does this for us, but in today’s world of social media
and personal AR devices, we’re losing touch with this part of ourselves”.
Goodfellow hopes that the Magenta Foundation will bring art to the scale of the technology
revolution, and notes that “it doesn’t hurt that the tech we’re building has opportunities to
revolutionize other AI fields, especially those in generative networks and noise reduction”.

Faced with the question of labor and of artist jobs, Goodfellow talks almost dismissively.
“Take Hollywood for example. It’s still alive and well today, even after 14 years of instantly
available, personal content allowed by YouTube”. Goodfellow thinks that the Magenta
Foundation will have effects in a very similar way. He concludes, “our goal is not to replace
artists. We just want to connect with people”.

B ut Patel and Goodfellow’s testimony is not the final say in this art exhibit. Underneath

the carefully constructed surface of “social good” made by The Magenta Foundation, much
scarier consequences of such an art exhibit loom. Renzo Piano, an Italian architect that also
paid a visit to The Magenta Collection, claims that this exhibit is “consumerism at its worst”
and a “gross manipulation of an industry that is already struggling”. Piano might be right.
Once you don your pair of AR glasses and enter the exhibit, each piece
of artwork stands by itself, no name tag, no signature, no attribution, “the exhibition
the identity of the artist that might have “inspired” the AI to construct a came so much
certain painting completely gone. Being a Gauguin fan myself, I noticed earlier than anyone
several paintings constructed for me in the style of Gauguin, but with expected”
no name attached to it.

Piano continues to claim that “the exhibition came so much earlier than anyone expected”.
The art industry as a whole has been completely unprepared for this type of exhibit,
emphasized by Piano’s emphatic disagreement with Goodfellow’s claims that artists will not
be affected by this advancement. “Art has always been our creative refuge, humanity’s
defining characteristic in a world where computers and AI are slowly replacing our jobs. But
now that the Magenta Foundation has made this AI artist, art is losing its meaning. No
longer is it a vehicle to convey meaning and push forward action in society. Now, it’s just a

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DECEMBER 15, 2024 PITTSBURGH, PA

fun little toy, designed to ‘maximize the enjoyment’ of the viewer”. Piano states that it will be
hard for artists to maintain a sense of dignity as their art is twisted by some black-box
algorithm to convert vehicles of change to vehicles of maximum enjoyment. “The market will
get incredibly harsh”, he claims.

As we continue into the future, artists are not standing still. A collection of artists, including
Piano, are preparing to sue the Magenta Foundation for copyright infringement and for
damages to their careers. But Goodfellow is completely unfazed. “It’s a frivolous lawsuit. All
our works are original, no copyright infringement anywhere to be seen. We expected this
type of pushback from the beginning, but the next generation of art is coming, and there’s
nothing we can do to stop it”.