Hito Steyerl & Ramon Amaro in Conversation : Tate Modern

German filmmaker and visual artist Hito Steyerl appeared in conversation with interdisciplinary scholar and researcher Ramon Amaro at Tate Modern this week.

Revered for her critical exploration of digital media, technology, and the circulation of images, Steyerl questioned if art can be made not only by machines but also for machines, and critiqued the production of images that contribute to environmental degradation, exploit workers, and fuel the arms trade.

Steyerl's new book, Medium Hot, examines the implications of digitally circulated images and data becoming training material for machine learning and AI. She considers the evolving nature of images in our contemporary world, examining how artificial intelligence, large language models, and algorithmic image generation are transforming our understanding of visual culture.

The conversation between Steyerl and Amaro was mainly engaging, but tinged with a cautionary undertone. I always find this in any discussion centred around AI but question if we should fear the beast in its entirety as we appear to. There will always exist a dread of the unknown, and admittedly the technology still in its infancy has revealed cracks in its armour, but maybe we should put more focus on how to live with and benefit from the technology.

Maybe my response is a little simplistic or naive, but I don't see a future where artists should fear AI, in fact I would say embrace it, I already do through Photoshop. Features such as Content-Aware Fill, Sky Replacement, and Object Selection Tool use AI to automate complex image editing tasks.

I'm not saying ignore the warnings, I've already discussed ways that machine learning has bias built into its DNA (see Week 10: AI - Database Experiments & Play), but from the sole perspective of the arts and artists we are still very much in control. We still own our voice, our emotion, our experience and everything else we choose to feed into our work.

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