Yahoo Lifestyle Bennett Miller Gets Guests Musing on AI With Paris Expo
UNCANNY VALLEY: Director and photographer Bennett Miller’s exhibition of photographs made using AI at the Gagosian got the guests talking at Monday evening about the controversial technology’s danger to creative professions.
“It’s a bit of a quandary for all of us,” said “Succession” actor Jeremy Strong, who has given a lot of thought to the topic lately. “There was a play in New York this fall called ‘McNeal’ and I wrote an introduction to the play for The Atlantic. I wrote about this question, AI encroaching on humanities and the arts, and how the two could coexist. Until now, I don’t think I felt that there had been any evidence that something genuine and visionary could come out of AI, but I do think that in Bennett’s hands, it has.”
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Strong has had a busy few months. The actor, known for his intense method style, just wrapped a biopic of Bruce Springsteen directed by Scott Cooper and starring Jeremy Allen White. His next project is a series about 9/11 first responders, to be directed by Tobias Lindholm. “It’s a story about how we treat our first responders. Given the situation in Los Angeles with the ash in the air, that storytelling has a vital role in this current administration,” he commented.
The reception drew an eclectic crowd of Paris art lovers and celebrities, from Karlie Kloss and Jordan Roth to Michèle Lamy and Yasiin Bey, the rapper and actor perhaps better known under his former name Mos Def.
For his photos, Miller, the Academy Award-nominated director of “Capote” and “Foxcatcher,” used generative artificial intelligence to create imagery that he then rendered in pigment and gelatin silver prints, a project that stemmed from a five-year yet-to-be-released documentary investigating how technology is impacting human experience. The blurred, almost ghostly images evoke early photographs, nodding to the invention of the genre in the 19th century.
Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, among the guests, drew comparisons with portraits by Julia Margaret Cameron or early works by Lewis Carroll, pointing out a haunting image of a girl’s face. (All of the works, as well as the exhibition, are untitled.) “AI connects you with ghosts, it brings you to original photography,” the designer said. “I find it very interesting that AI can be an archeological tool, it can help people look at the past. It is connected not just a technology for the future, it can connect us with history,” he said.
Art critic Jérôme Sans drew parallels with other technological shifts. “It takes me back to the end of the ’90s, when people were concerned with the arrival of the internet,” he said. “AI is not just a stupid thing, it’s maybe your best assistant, your best memory, and maybe your enemy too. I work with it regularly. It makes you react, so it’s very useful. It makes my brain react, not to find a final solution, but to make me find a solution.”
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