One of the most striking PR moments of the AI age was the sale by Christie's auction house in October, 2018[1], of a painting output by an algorithm, titled "Edmond de Belamy," for $432,000. The painting was touted by the auctioneers, and the curators who profited, as "created by an artificial intelligence."
The hyperbole was cringe-worthy to anyone who knows anything about AI. "It," to the extent the entire field can be referred to as an it, doesn't have agency, for one thing.
For another thing, an entire chain of technological production, involving many human actors, is obscured with such nonsense.
But did ordinary people buy the hype? Was anyone swayed by such marketing mythology?
Some people very well may have manipulated into false beliefs, according to Ziv Epstein, a PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab who studies the intersection of AI and art.
Epstein conducted an interesting study of beliefs involving several hundred individuals, which he wrote up in a paper published this week in iScience[2], an imprint of Cell Press.
"You ask people what they think about the AI, some of them treated it very agent-like, like this intelligent creator of the artwork, and other people saw it as more of a tool, like Adobe Photoshop," Epstein told ZDNet in an interview