I am a figurative artist based in New York with work in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, SFMOMA, and the British Museum. I have been making art since the 1970s. Earlier this month I published my catalog raisonne as an open dataset on Hugging Face. Roughly 3,000 to 4,000 documented works spanning five decades, with full metadata, CC-BY-NC-4.0 licensed for research and non-commercial use. My total output is approximately double that and I will keep adding to it as I scan the existing archive. The dataset has had over 2,500 downloads in its first week. Most of the conversation about AI and art focuses on what AI does to artists. Replacing them, imitating them, devaluing their work. I wanted to explore a different question. What does it look like when an artist chooses to engage with AI proactively, on his own terms, by making his life’s work available as a properly licensed, documented dataset? My paintings have always been about the human figure, rendered through paint, ink, and drawing across fifty years. What does machine intelligence see when it looks at that body of work? Does it see what the artist intended? Does it see something the artist did not? I do not have answers. I have fifty years of looking and a dataset that is now available to researchers who want to find out. I have also been using AI as a collaborator in making new work and am building over time a series inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain as ordinals. I would welcome any conversation with researchers, developers, or anyone thinking seriously about art and AI. Dataset: huggingface.co/datasets/Hafftka/michael-hafftka-catalog-raisonne More context: hafftka.substack.com/p/i-published-my-lifes-work-as-an-ai submitted by /u/hafftka
Originally posted by u/hafftka on r/ArtificialInteligence