AI And The Infinity Scroll: Has Contemporary Art Lost Its Shock Factor?
Remember when ChatGPT launched, totally free with no barrier of access, and we all found it hilarious to deepfake the world around us, asking it to tell us rubbish jokes and see how far we could push its buttons. “It’ll be like 3D,” said my mother. “It will be the big thing for a while, then everyone will realise it’s a bit naff.”
Cut to 2026, when conversations around the ethics of artificial intelligence and the companies responsible for them. Grok hit the headlines after its chatbot was found to enable users in creating sexual abuse material, including indecent images of children. In Australia, an OpenAI agent was found to have hacked into an Australian government website. Military experts have predicted AI could be the end of us all, as the doomsday clock ticks ever further to midnight.
The catastrophic, career-threatening impact of AI has also been felt profoundly in art. Scroll through Instagram or Pinterest and the presence of AI slop is inevitable. You can usually tell an AI-generated image from the real thing, thanks to the lurid circus colours, weird opacity and unconventional fingers, but should we not be more frightened of a time when the two become indistinguishable? Good art is not just self-expression, but one of the most unfiltered records we have of history and popular culture, and what better demonstration of that individuality than with provocative, often shocking modern art?
Think Marc Quinn designing a sculpture with nine pints of his own blood, or Damien Hurst preserving a dead tiger shark in a formaldehyde tank. Shock is integral to art in all its forms, whether we mean David Lynch’s WTF surrealism, Madonna’s erotica, or provocateurs like Sacha Baren Cohen and Eli Roth. How will art truly be able to shock us, though, in an age where images are made available to us at every minute of every day?
“I think there’s a danger that surprise itself becomes routine,” says Ana Bilbao Yarto, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of York. “That’s one reason I think physical encounters with art remain especially important, because an artwork encountered offline can demand a different kind of attention. There is presence, materiality, scale, smell, atmosphere, and an awareness of your own body in relation to something else. Those experiences reconnect us with ourselves and with the physical environment around us in ways that the endless online flow rarely could. I think those spaces are worth protecting.”
Ana’s research focuses primarily on contemporary art from the Global South and the relationships between art and extractivism. She thinks art is a valuable way to address the anxieties surrounding AI and advance conversations around misinformation, labour, authorship and ownership: “Artists are often very good at opening up spaces in which difficult questions can be raised without necessarily having to resolve them immediately.”
AI may ultimately find its way into the curriculum for art history courses like Ana’s, with students investigating the impact, and most importantly, the harms of these tools in art, changing the face of her discipline.
“As art historians, we may need new ways of thinking about collaboration, production and circulation, and these changes may also encourage us to continue questioning the boundaries of art history itself: what we call art, where it happens, who produces it and where people encounter it.”
Who better to go to when discussing this than The Collective Edit’s resident artist Azzurra? “You have to filter through the popular trends and draw inspiration from things that captivate you and move you in the day-to-day, whether it’s outfits, architecture or online photos.
“You’re exposed to a large number of images every day so it’s inevitable that the more memorable things will be the more outlandish ones. If something’s got shock factor, there needs to be depth. There’s amazing art on the internet, and it’s not about what’s good or bad, because art is subjective, but about sifting through the difference between what you think is meaningful and what you are told to think is meaningful”.
Azzurra notes some advantages of The Eternal Scroll when it comes to being an artist and finding ideas for that art: “You get instant inspiration from places like Pinterest. There’s also wider access to artwork from other countries and cultures you’d never see elsewhere".
“I hope people go the other way and see how terrifying AI is, and see the thing that makes art human is imperfection, not perfection, like AI gives you, because imperfections show us much more about the world, and I don’t think AI can replicate that”.
Arguments against the use of AI undeniably outweigh any benefits. Anthropic and OpenAI have public charters which reinstate the boundlessness of potential for these tools to generate new ideas, but the PR jargon unsurprisingly steers clear of the harms or any mention of an action plan to curb them. We are still in early days, most worrying of all. The pulping of literature into LLMs, or Take a Break replacing all their short story writers with AI storytellers, or every millennial you know posting on Facebook what AI thinks they looked like in the eighties, is just the beginning.
There is still hope. Any artist worth their buck will find engaging ways to interact with the crises around them. “Art is curiosity,” says Azzurra. “And some artists will inevitably be curious enough to investigate the potential use for AI in art.”
One artist that stood out to her in the endless scroll were oil paintings from Prints by Shiloh. The series portrays jazz musicians in wonky bird's-eye views: “I love the perspective and composition of them. They’re quite abstract or distorted in certain ways, but still really beautiful, and I think there’s something very atmospheric about them beyond just being technically impressive.”
Meanwhile, Ana was struck by the work of Carolina Caycedo, who engages with the connection between artistic practice and extractivism: “We mostly think of innovation as producing an image or object nobody has seen before, but it can also be about the ethics of how an artist works. I’m interested not just in what artwork looks like or whether it shocks me, but in whether artists are finding new and responsible ways of making art in the first place.”
We might be less shocked by the art we see now due to the sheer volume of it, but keep your eyes peeled, your mind open and you might be pleasantly surprised. AI is yet another curveball human artists will sadly need to overcome. All we have to do, as casual observers of that art, is to be just as open and listen to what they have to say. Are you up for that challenge?
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