On artificial intelligence beyond the headlines, and the artists, musicians and creative minds exploring what happens when human imagination meets a new kind of intelligence.

Artificial intelligence has become almost impossible to avoid. It writes emails, answers questions, generates photographs, recommends what we should watch and increasingly finds its way into the smallest details of everyday life. The conversation surrounding it tends to move between extraordinary optimism and equally extraordinary anxiety, with predictions about disappearing professions, technological revolutions and an uncertain future arriving almost daily.

Yet some of the most interesting things happening with artificial intelligence have little to do with productivity, efficiency or the familiar promise of doing more in less time.

In London, an artist has spent more than a decade learning to draw alongside robots. In Berlin, a musician has trained an artificial intelligence on the voices of a human choir, treating it almost as another member of the ensemble. Elsewhere, machine-generated tulips respond to the price of Bitcoin, a documentary about a musician changes with every screening, and poetry is being written through an unusual collaboration between a human author and her digital counterpart.

These experiments belong to a less frequently discussed side of artificial intelligence, one in which the technology is not necessarily intended to make something faster, cheaper or more convenient. Instead, it is being used to explore ideas that would have been difficult, and sometimes impossible, to realise through conventional creative methods.

Of course, the relationship between technology and art is hardly new. Photography was once considered a threat to painting, electronic instruments challenged traditional definitions of music, and digital editing fundamentally changed filmmaking. Each development introduced new creative possibilities while raising uncomfortable questions about authenticity, skill and authorship.

Artificial intelligence presents its own complications. The use of copyrighted work in training models, the difficulty of distinguishing human-made images from synthetic ones, and the growing abundance of instantly generated content are serious concerns. It would be naive to ignore them, particularly at a time when so much of what appears on our screens is becoming increasingly difficult to trust.

But reducing the entire subject to a question of whether machines will replace artists overlooks the people already finding more imaginative ways to work with them. Their projects reveal something considerably more interesting than a machine capable of imitating a painting or composing a convincing pop song.

Perhaps the question worth asking is not whether artificial intelligence can be creative, but what kinds of creativity become possible when artists begin treating it as something other than a shortcut.

This week, we explore seven perspectives on the unexpected cultural life of AI, from experimental music and contemporary art to literature, cinema and a new kind of museum.

01. Read: Technelegy by Sasha Stiles

An unusual literary experiment between a poet and her artificial counterpart

Long before ChatGPT became a familiar presence in everyday life, the poet and artist Sasha Stiles was already exploring what might happen when artificial intelligence entered the writing process.

Her book Technelegy, first published in 2021, brings together poetry, visual art and language experiments developed in collaboration with an AI system trained on her own writing and research. Rather than asking a machine to imitate a famous literary voice, Stiles created a digital counterpart informed by her personal archive, allowing her to examine the relationship between memory, language and authorship.

The result is an unusual book, both a collection of poetry and a record of an ongoing creative experiment. Some passages feel recognisably human, while others introduce unfamiliar combinations of words and ideas. Throughout, the distinction between the writer and her technological collaborator becomes part of the work itself.

What makes Technelegy particularly compelling is that Stiles approaches artificial intelligence through literature rather than technological spectacle. Poetry has always been shaped by constraints, unexpected associations and experiments with language, and AI introduces another way of investigating those possibilities.

The book is also a beautifully considered object, with visual material accompanying the texts. For readers interested in contemporary literature, experimental publishing or the future of creative authorship, it offers an intriguing introduction to a field that is still developing its own conventions.

Discover Technelegy and its editions

02. Listen: PROTO by Holly Herndon

The musician who invited artificial intelligence into her choir

American composer Holly Herndon has spent much of her career exploring how technology might expand the possibilities of the human voice. Her 2019 album PROTO offers one of the more fascinating examples of artificial intelligence becoming part of a musical collaboration.

At the centre of the project is Spawn, an AI system developed to learn from and respond to human voices. Rather than training it solely through existing recordings, Herndon organised collective singing sessions in which performers gathered to teach the system through live vocal exercises.

The process resembles an experimental choir rehearsal as much as a technological project. Human voices provide the material, the machine learns to interpret their patterns, and the resulting compositions combine electronic experimentation with elements of choral music, folk singing and contemporary performance.

The album moves between moments of unexpected beauty and deliberately strange vocal arrangements. Tracks such as Eternal offer a relatively accessible introduction, while Godmother, developed with producer Jlin and Spawn, reveals the more unpredictable possibilities of the collaboration.

Herndon's approach is particularly interesting because it resists the idea that technological progress should necessarily involve removing people from the creative process. Instead, the album imagines artificial intelligence as another participant, capable of introducing unfamiliar sounds while remaining dependent on the musicians surrounding it.

PROTO is not conventional background listening, but it offers a remarkably different perspective on what AI-generated music might become.

Listen to PROTO on Bandcamp

03. Discover: Anna Ridler's artificial tulips

When a seventeenth-century flower becomes a portrait of modern speculation

At first glance, British artist Anna Ridler's Mosaic Virus appears to be a contemporary interpretation of a traditional Dutch still-life painting. Tulips slowly change their colours and forms across a screen, producing something both beautiful and slightly unnatural.

The work becomes more interesting when its underlying idea is revealed.

Ridler used machine learning to create artificial tulips whose appearance responds to fluctuations in the price of Bitcoin. The project connects the speculative excitement surrounding cryptocurrencies with the extraordinary tulip market of seventeenth-century Holland, when certain bulbs became objects of intense financial speculation.

Even the title carries a historical reference. The mosaic virus was responsible for the striking striped patterns that made certain tulips especially desirable during the period known as tulip mania.

What distinguishes Ridler's work from the abundance of AI-generated imagery is the research behind it. She created her own photographic dataset of tulips rather than simply relying on an existing image collection. The process of selecting, photographing and organising the material became an essential part of the artistic work.

The resulting flowers are neither straightforward photographs nor entirely invented objects. They reflect what a machine has learned about the appearance of a tulip, while their changing forms connect two moments of financial speculation separated by almost four centuries.

It is a compelling example of how an emerging technology can be used to tell an unexpectedly historical story, and how something as familiar as a flower can become a way of examining the cultural values of an entirely different age.

Explore Mosaic Virus and Anna Ridler's work

04. Watch: Eno, the documentary that is never quite the same

Gary Hustwit's experiment in generative cinema

Most documentaries are carefully assembled into a definitive sequence. Interviews, archival footage, music and narrative are arranged by the filmmaker, and the finished work remains essentially unchanged each time it is screened.

Director Gary Hustwit's Eno, released in 2024, takes a different approach.

Created around the life and work of musician and producer Brian Eno, the documentary uses a generative software system to assemble material from an extensive archive of interviews, footage and music. Different screenings can therefore present different combinations of scenes, making each version a distinct interpretation of the same subject.

It is an especially appropriate format for a film about Eno, whose artistic career has long been associated with generative music, chance and systems that produce unexpected outcomes.

The project asks an interesting question about cinema: does a film need to have one fixed form in order to be considered complete?

Rather than using technology simply to produce special effects or synthetic imagery, Hustwit applies computational processes to the structure of storytelling itself. The filmmaker still determines the material and creative framework, but the precise relationship between its elements is allowed to change.

For an audience accustomed to seeing the same film every time, the possibility of a documentary that evolves with each viewing is a rather wonderful proposition. It also suggests that the future of cinema might involve reconsidering the format of the work, rather than simply changing how images are produced.

Eno has been presented through special cinema screenings, with selected versions also appearing on streaming platforms.

Discover Eno and its screenings

05. Visit: DATALAND, Los Angeles

A museum dedicated to a new form of digital art

Los Angeles has become home to an institution devoted to an emerging artistic medium. Opened in June 2026, DATALAND presents itself as a museum dedicated to artificial intelligence art, bringing together data, digital environments and large-scale sensory installations.

The project comes from media artist Refik Anadol, whose work has become widely recognised for transforming enormous collections of information into moving visual compositions. Architectural surfaces, digital screens and immersive environments become places where data can be experienced as colour, movement and form.

At DATALAND, this approach is developed into a museum experience. Its opening presentation, Machine Dreams: Rainforest, draws on the natural world to create an environment shaped by AI-based artistic processes.

What is particularly intriguing is the way the project challenges the familiar idea of a museum as a place where visitors encounter finished objects. Traditional paintings and sculptures remain essentially unchanged, but computational artworks can introduce movement, variation and processes that continue unfolding over time.

There is also something revealing about the choice of Los Angeles. A city historically associated with cinema, visual entertainment and technological experimentation is now hosting an institution that attempts to establish artificial intelligence as an artistic medium in its own right.

The spectacle of immersive digital art will not appeal to everyone, and technological complexity alone is hardly a guarantee of artistic quality. Still, DATALAND represents a noteworthy development in how museums might present and collect creative work in the coming years.

For readers travelling to Los Angeles, it offers an unusual addition to the city's cultural itinerary.

Explore DATALAND and plan a visit

06. Meet: Sougwen Chung, the artist who draws with robots

An unexpected collaboration between the human hand and the machine

Chinese-Canadian artist Sougwen Chung has been drawing alongside robotic systems since 2015. Her ongoing project, Drawing Operations, examines what happens when the gestures of a human artist become part of a shared creative process with a machine.

In early performances, Chung worked at a drawing surface while a robotic arm followed her movements, interpreting and reproducing gestures through cameras and computational systems. Later versions developed more complex forms of interaction, using accumulated drawing histories and other signals to influence how the machines respond.

The finished works are often large, fluid compositions, with marks that appear to move between the deliberate and the unpredictable. There is something almost choreographic about the process, particularly when viewed through documentation of the performances rather than the finished drawings alone.

Unlike artists who use AI to produce an image before transferring it into a physical form, Chung makes the interaction itself central to the work. The viewer can see the hesitation, coordination and occasional unpredictability involved in creating something together.

Her practice has also entered major institutional collections. MEMORY, a work from the second generation of her robotic drawing systems, was acquired by London's Victoria and Albert Museum, marking an important moment in the recognition of AI-based artistic practices.

Chung's work is particularly rewarding because it remains deeply connected to the physical act of making. Despite the technological complexity involved, the central subjects are familiar ones: movement, drawing, material, rhythm and the relationship between an artist and her tools.

It offers a more nuanced image of the artist's studio of the future, one in which technology does not necessarily replace the hand, but develops an unfamiliar relationship with it.

Discover Sougwen Chung's Drawing Operations

07. Read: Artificial Aesthetics by Lev Manovich and Emanuele Arielli

Can a machine develop its own sense of beauty?

Among the many books examining artificial intelligence, Artificial Aesthetics: Generative AI, Art and Visual Media offers a particularly relevant perspective for anyone interested in contemporary visual culture.

Written by media theorist Lev Manovich and aesthetics scholar Emanuele Arielli, the book examines how generative AI is changing the production and appreciation of art, images and design.

One of its central questions is whether artificial intelligence might eventually produce an aesthetic that feels genuinely distinct from human creative traditions, rather than simply reproducing styles found in the material on which it was trained.

It is a fascinating possibility, particularly when considering how quickly AI-generated photography, illustrations and design have developed their own recognisable visual conventions. Images created using different systems can often share a similar sense of polish, lighting or composition, suggesting that the technology may already influence our visual tastes in ways we do not fully recognise.

Manovich and Arielli approach these questions through art history, visual culture, psychology and philosophy, offering a broader perspective than the usual conversations about which software produces the most convincing images.

Some sections are more theoretical than others, but the book is particularly interesting for its examination of artistic authorship and the relationship between technological tools and aesthetic judgement.

An additional reason to discover it is its accessibility: the complete English edition is available to read online free of charge, making it an unusually open contribution to an important cultural debate.

Read Artificial Aesthetics

A final thought

For much of its history, art has evolved alongside changes in the tools available to artists. New materials, instruments, photographic processes and recording technologies have all influenced what could be created and how audiences experienced it. Artificial intelligence belongs to that history, although the questions it introduces may be unusually complicated.

What makes the projects gathered here interesting is not simply their use of advanced technology. It is the very different ideas their creators have chosen to explore with it. A musician builds a choir around an artificial voice, a poet develops a digital literary counterpart, an artist connects speculative markets to seventeenth-century flowers, and a filmmaker allows a documentary to change its own narrative.

None of these projects settles the debate about the place of artificial intelligence in culture, nor should they. Some of the most consequential questions about authorship, artistic labour and the ownership of creative material remain unresolved.

But they do offer an alternative to the assumption that the future of AI will be defined entirely by automation and increasingly convincing imitation.

Perhaps the most interesting cultural developments will come not from machines learning to reproduce what humans already make, but from the people willing to explore the unfamiliar possibilities that emerge when the two begin working together.

For now, that seems a much more interesting story than another prediction about the future.