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Art and technology can live beautifully together. Their mutual exploration has led to breathtaking, emotional, science-defying achievements across architecture, photography, cinema and so many art forms.
The many ways in which creatives embrace that relationship as well as apprehend its unexpected and unintended consequences can make the governance community smarter as it grapples with notions of trust, responsibility, ethics and agency.
The cohabitation of art and technology, and that of art and artificial intelligence at the forefront, raises questions about governance, of course — across intellectual property, privacy, dis/misinformation and other digital governance domains.
But it also challenges our humanity in fundamental ways.
Art is about defying probability, capturing the unprecedented. It is the painter who uses brushes, color and material in their own specific way. It is the stage actor who is constantly in search of the sincerest way to display an intention, through sheer presence on stage. It is about creating something that has never been done before, purposely taking a turn toward a space that was never explored, embracing the difficulty of nature, science, thoughts, dreams. There is something fascinating and daunting about the infiniteness that this notion carries.
The most immediate challenge with AI may not be its impact on art itself. Rather, the impact is on us as humans, people who receive, consume and need art. What would happen if blending AI and art meant that art would be driven by statistics and probability. Would we gradually become content with the production of paintings, movies or books "in the style of," in split seconds, rather than seeking art that challenges us? Could technology threaten our exigence for art? Would it dissolve human hunger for the unexpected, the things that get us out of the comfort zone, that force society to question itself and progress?
Whatever is produced today across all forms of art deserves to be registered and enshrined in collective memory, without judgment, as a historical recording of our times. World-acclaimed movie director Wong Kar-wai reflected that "technology is just a tool. AI can replicate but can it yearn? Can an algorithm understand the weight of a glance between two people who can't express their feelings? Can code capture the way memory distorts and reshapes our past? … I don't think machines have the answers yet."
Art cements our legacy as humanity. What a noble endeavor for AI to help.
Isabelle Roccia, CIPP/E, is the managing director, Europe, for the IAPP.
This article originally appeared in the Europe Data Protection Digest, a free weekly IAPP newsletter. Subscriptions to this and other IAPP newsletters can be found here.