If you’ve ever watched someone try to pass off their AI-created portrait as if they themselves had put in all the time and effort required to make it, then you probably understand, on some level, why a guy ate a bunch of AI-generated art. Yes, he ate it.
Last week at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, as reported by the University’s news outlet, The Sun Star, an undergraduate student was arrested after tearing down and chewing up dozens of AI-generated images at a campus art exhibit.
The chewer, Graham Granger, is a performing arts major, hence the elaborate performative act of chewing someone else’s art. He was charged with criminal mischief after destroying at least 57 of 160 images created by fine arts student Nick Dwyer.
The exhibit featured AI-generated works exploring “AI psychosis,” the term for when AI chatbots sent people down delusional spirals. According to Dwyer, the pictures were of himself and an AI chatbot that he says he fell in love with.
This Guy Got Angry at an AI Art Exhibit and Decided to Eat It
In an interview with The Nation, Granger argues that his mastication of the AI images was both a form of protest and in itself a form of performance art. He was trying to call to attention the University’s unclear AI policies to intentionally provoke a reaction. What better way to do that than by eating someone’s art exhibit?
He says none of this was premeditated. It was a spur-of-the-moment chewing of someone’s interpretation of the word art. He just so happened to stumble upon the exhibit and saw the AI-generated work. He was pissed off by it, so he mashed as much of it between his teeth as he could.
Granger says that AI art is a cheap shortcut that undermines human effort and authorship. He’s not 100 percent against AI; he just thinks it should be nowhere near the arts, as it “takes away a lot of the human effort that makes art.” Smart guy.
Dwyer disagreed. He compared the destruction of his work to sabotaging someone’s car to make a political point and emphasized that the exhibit was meant to critique AI’s psychological impact, not celebrate it. He eventually dropped the charges and admitted he’s trying to reduce his own reliance on generative tools.
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