- Oscar-nominated director Bennett Miller is known for his films "Capote," "Moneyball," and "Foxcatcher."
- Miller's latest work, on exhibition at NYC's Gagosian Gallery, is a collaboration with the AI image-maker DALL-E.
Director Bennett Miller spent decades in Hollywood working on films like "Moneyball" and "Foxcatcher" before making way for his latest obsession — artificial intelligence.
Five years ago, Miller began working on a film about AI, examining the costs and benefits of the technology.
Over the course of the project, he produced more than 20,000 images using the open AI digital image generator DALL-E. DALL-E uses textual prompts to generate images and is able to synthesize stylistic prompts as well as visual cues. A selection of 20 prints from that experiment is currently on view at Gagosian gallery in Manhattan.
The images included in the exhibition hit upon an uncanny valley, seemingly culled from a bygone era of rustling landscapes and manifest destiny. The longer you stare at them, the more you become aware that the people you're viewing are not only not alive but never were, a product of a string of words, a series of prompts.
Can something be haunting if it lacks the soul to become a ghost?
Evoking early ethnographic studies made by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in which early American settlers would photograph and document indigenous peoples they encountered, many of Miller's photos center on studies of otherness — be they human, spiritual, or technological. But AI's imagery comes with its own "ingrained biases and capacity for disinformation," as the gallery notes — one study found that DALL-E's consumer model, DALL-E 2, chose white men when given the prompt "CEO" 97% of the time.
The use of AI in art has been a contentious topic. Critics are concerned that having the ability to produce work digitally via prompt could possibly put fine artists and photographers out of work. Proponents of AI say it's simply a tool for artists to speed up their artistic practice, and allows them to create beyond their artistic capabilities.
Speaking to ArtNet last month, Miller said he wasn't sure what to think of the technology.
"The emergence of AI has brought us to the precipice of imagination-defying transformations and there do not seem to be any adults in the room," he said.
Curiously, Miller's exhibition evokes another one of his films in a roundabout way. In 2005, he made a film version of the 1966 Truman Capote classic "In Cold Blood" for which he received a best director Academy Award nomination.
Capote's groundbreaking nonfiction novel chronicles the aftermath of the Clutter family murders in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas. Capote spent months following the case and trials of Perry Smith and Robert Hickock, who were convicted of murdering the family and put to death. When a film of Capote's book was first made in 1967, Capote insisted that director Richard Brooks film at the very house where the Clutters had been murdered.
In a 1968 essay for the Saturday Evening Post about the making of the film, Capote wrote: "All art is composed of selected detail, either imaginary, or … a distillation of reality." He could have been speaking of Miller's AI images.
In writing the nonfiction novel, Capote noted in the Post that he'd "chosen my details from life," while the film's director "had distilled his from my book: reality twice transposed, and all the truer for it."
Capote went on to say that he found the 1967 filmed version of "In Cold Blood" so disturbing because it was "reality and art so intertwined to the point that there is no identifiable area of demarcation."
In the case of Miller's AI photographs, the same is true.
"It's just layers upon layers of fiction," Miller told Artnet. "It's going to become increasingly difficult to distinguish or know with any type of certainty that anything you see is authentic."
Bennett Miller's works are on view at Gagosian until April 22. 976 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10075