AI FOMO? Why cool heads are needed in the arts

Two speakers at the ACMI FACT Symposium took a critical stance amid pressures for those in the arts and cultural sectors to jump on the AI bandwagon.
Katrina Sluis presenting 'Looking at the Machine' at ACMI Future of Arts, Culture & Technology Symposium 2024. Photo: ArtsHub. A presentation slide on stage outlining the AI imaginaries of the art museum. The content of the slide is discussed in the article.

‘The information age has ended, and we have entered the age of noise,’ declared Eryk Salvaggio at ACMI’s Future of Arts, Culture and Technology Symposium (FACT) 2024 on Wednesday (14 February). In the session titled ‘Looking at the Machine’, Salvaggio assessed the state of digital and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in relation to how we consume images, sound, knowledge … everything that’s “out there”.

He continued: ‘The entirety of human visual culture has a new name. We used to call these collections archives or museum holdings or libraries; today, we call them datasets.’

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Celina Lei is an arts writer and editor at ArtsHub. She acquired her M.A in Art, Law and Business in New York with a B.A. in Art History and Philosophy from the University of Melbourne. She has previously worked across global art hubs in Beijing, Hong Kong and New York in both the commercial art sector and art criticism. She took part in drafting NAVA’s revised Code of Practice - Art Fairs and was the project manager of ArtsHub’s diverse writers initiative, Amplify Collective. Celina is based in Naarm/Melbourne.