1. What is it to think as an artist in the Age of AI?

To think as an artist in the age of AI is to think with systems that are bigger than me, but not to be swallowed by them.
My imagination is no longer just what happens inside my own head; it is constantly entangled with datasets, algorithms, interfaces, and platforms that I did not design, but still have to respond to.

When I use AI, I am never starting from a blank page. The “empty” text box is already crowded: with millions of images, with other people’s words, with invisible labour, with rules written by companies. Thinking as an artist now means staying conscious of these hidden layers, and deciding when I want to follow them and when I want to push against them.

In this context, creativity is less about being a lonely genius and more about orchestrating relationships:

between human attention and machine automation,

between my own experiences and anonymous training data,

between play and responsibility.

To think as an artist in the age of AI is to sit inside this tension. I am both user and subject, both “author” and “prompt.” I borrow the machine’s speed and scale, but I still claim the role of the one who chooses, edits, rejects, and takes responsibility for the final work.

I do not want AI to replace my thinking. I want it to interrupt my habits, show me unexpected directions, and then give the decision back to me.

2. How should artists, and any creative for that matter, relate to these new systems?

I don’t think artists need to worship AI or reject it completely. The more honest position is somewhere in between:
treat AI as a powerful, flawed collaborator.

That means:

Recognizing AI as a tool built inside specific economic and political systems (platforms, surveillance, data extraction), not as a neutral magic box.

Staying curious about how it works: who made it, what data it was trained on, whose images, voices, and histories are inside it, and who benefits from it.

Setting my own boundaries: deciding which parts of my process I am comfortable automating, and which parts I want to protect as slow, physical, and personal.

Instead of asking, “Is AI good or bad for art?” I ask:
What does this system do to my way of seeing?
If it makes everything smoother and more generic, I need to question it.
If it opens a space for new questions, new frictions, or new hybrids of human and machine, then it may be worth keeping in my toolbox—under my terms.

3. How to embrace its potentials while being aware of its failures and dangers?

For me, “embracing” AI doesn’t mean trusting it; it means using it with critical intimacy.

On the one hand, AI can:

speed up certain technical tasks,

generate variations I would never think of,

help me prototype ideas rapidly,

translate between media (text → image → video) in playful ways.

On the other hand, I cannot forget that:

AI systems hallucinate, reproduce biases, and confidently output wrong information.

They are trained on huge archives that often include people’s work without consent.

They can be used to automate creative labour, erase credits, and turn art into endless content.

So I try to build friction into my workflow:

I always double-check AI outputs instead of accepting them as “truth.”

I treat AI results as sketches to be edited, cut up, painted over, or contradicted, not as finished artworks.

I stay transparent about when and how I used AI, and I give myself space to say “no” and go back to analog methods.

To embrace AI responsibly is to keep my ethics and my politics turned on, even when the interface looks friendly and playful.

4. How to expand our creativity through the use of these systems?

AI can expand creativity when I use it to stretch my patterns, not replace them.

Some strategies I use or imagine:

Prompt as score
I write prompts the way I might write instructions for a performance or a musical score. The AI’s output becomes one version of the “performance,” and my job is to interpret, remix, and sometimes deliberately break my own instructions.

Controlled randomness
I ask AI for strange combinations or impossible scenarios, then select the fragments that resonate with me. The system becomes a chaos generator; I become the editor, curator, and translator who turns noise into meaning.

Cross-media experiments
I move ideas between drawing, writing, sound, game design, and AI outputs. For example, I might sketch something by hand, feed it into an AI tool, then repaint or redraw the result. Each translation adds distortion, and that distortion can become my style.

Self-reflection loop
I can also use AI to question my own work: asking it to critique, to suggest opposites, or to describe my images in words. I don’t have to agree with it, but its “opinion” gives me another mirror to think through.

In the best case, AI doesn’t make creation easier; it makes it stranger.
It pushes me into territories where I no longer know exactly what I’m doing—and that uncertainty is where new forms of art can appear, as long as I stay awake, responsible, and willing to disagree with the machine.

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