Generative AI and the Revival of Creative Imitation
Mario Carpo
© Courtesy of the artists and the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House
In the framework of his contribution to the Chronograms of Architecture exhibition Mario Carpo will give an insight into the most recent developments of his Short But Believable History of the Digital Turn in Architecture.
Generative AI does not create new images out of thin air; it generates images that have a “certain something” in common with a selection of images we have fed into it. This selection, often called a dataset, can be generic or custom-made; either way, Generative AI automates the imitation and replication of some of its common visual features. Imitation was for centuries the backbone of the classical tradition in European art, and it was de facto banned by 20th-century modernism for many good reasons. As the rise of Generative AI is bringing the practice of imitation back to our design schools and to the design professions, we urgently need to learn again what imitation is, how it works, what it does, and how we can deal with it today, in critical and creative terms. Every dataset is a canon, but every reference to precedent is based on preference, and we know all too well that preference is often a proxy for prejudice.
BOOK HERE
Mario Carpo is the Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett, University College London; and Professor of Architectural Theory and professor emeritus at Die Angewandte (University of Applied Arts) in Vienna. His publications include The Alphabet and the Algorithm (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011; also translated into other languages); The Digital Turn in Architecture, 1992-2012 (Chichester: Wiley, 2012); The second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017); Beyond Digital. Design and Automation at the End of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2023).
