Stetson AI Art Exhibit Beams Light On Future

A camera, held by a man in a hoodie, dominates a scene of seeming chaos. Two more hands help hold it up. Someone else’s finger rests on the shutter button. Still another hand shifts the lens. Look more closely and virtually everyone in the crowd is shooting pictures.

The piece, ​“You Have The Power To Determine Who You Are” by Santana Brightly, was among the works spotlighted at the opening of an exhibit on Saturday at Stetson Library. Santana, a seventh-grade student at Hamden’s Sahge Academy, produced the piece while taking part in a month-long graphic arts workshop in AI Art this summer at Stetson.

“We are about giving our young people outlets for creative expression as a way toward mental wellness and to enrich their communities,” said Jessica Gilliam, co-founder of Ignite the Voice, which sponsored the workshop as part of its Youth Resilience Project. 

She said she had reached out to Cody Norris, who teaches AI art at Arts FOR Learning CT, and traditional art at Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School.

“AI art in itself is a journey through cutting-edge new technology,” Norris said. ​“To be able to give students a chance to be a part of what is brand-new and fresh gives them a huge start for different paths to the future.” 

As much as traditionalists may scoff at any form of AI-generated art, it’s a reality. AI applications are ​“likely to effect just about every job that requires creativity,” according to forbes.com. ​“Generative AI is a tool, and those who learn to harness its potential are those who are likely to prosper rather than find themselves being replaced.”

That’s perhaps true of Santana, who explained the process of creating her crowd scene. ​“We learned how to describe the image we wanted, apply a prompt, and then put chaos at the end to make it more spectacular,” she said, referring to an AI image generator. 

Amayah Smith, another member of the eight-person workshop, said she’s been drawing ​“in realism,” as she put it, ​“people, faces, body parts” from a young age. The AI discipline ​“forced me to work bigger and in a different way,” she said, as she stood in front of her Kandinsky-text-to-image generated design. ​“I definitely want to keep going with it.”

That means a lot to Norris, it seems. ​“This workshop was a way to show these kids that their work has value, that they can create value with their own hands, and that they don’t have to go out and work some place they don’t like,” he said. ​“You put in the time, you develop those skills, you got options.”