Art, Technology and Agency
I recently was invited onto a panel by the Regional Arts Triennial on the topic of Art, Technology and Agency, as part of the Radical Futures: the 2026 WA Regional Visual Arts Summit. It was a wide-ranging and invigorating discussion facilitated by Laetitia Wilson, with two of us (Rebecca Brookes and I) being artists working with technology and Amy Rumble offering a legal perspective on authorship, AI generated material and policy and regulation changes.
Some notes from the discussion:
- Australia is looking at adopting an "opt-out" model, where artists and creators will have to explicitly state they do not want their work used in data sets. This is problematic because it puts the onus of protection onto the creators, which goes against Australian copyright law.
- Unfortunately, at present the onus on protecting work does fall on the creator, with mixed results.
- To claim copyright for a work, there needs to be a human creator - which means if you use AI in your work, there is a likelihood your work can be assessed as not having enough human involvement for your work to be copyrighted.
- Intention matters when using AI - or any other tool, for that matter. Are you using something for the sake of using it, or are you using it because it helps and/or adds to the narrative of the work? What does your work need in order to fully express itself?
- That being said, it is interesting that some organisations are pushing for greater incorporation of AI, largely because it's there, it's new and there's an assumption it will improve productivity. The general consensus is that - at present anyway - it's not always the case because a human still needs to check an AI's output.
- Speaking of tools, it's important to look at the terms and conditions of whatever digital tools you are using - are they using generative AI? Are they using you as part of a dataset? Do some things even need AI or is AI being inserted "just because"?
- Human slop is preferable to AI slop - at least it's authentic.