We are excited to invite all artists and AI enthusiasts to our AI Art Competition and Exposition, titled “The Future Will Be Better Tomorrow.” This competition aims to showcase how AI models can be powerful tools in the artistic process and to explore your perspectives on the future of AI.
The competition consists of the following phases:
Learn more about the Competition below, and submit your work here:
Most economists assume that technology, like GDP, grows by a fixed yearly percentage. According to this thesis, our lives will become more advanced and interconnected each year, but only gradually, leaving us ample time to absorb these changes.
This point of view is now under intense scrutiny. The arrival of ChatGPT, whose own authors believed it was an incremental update of not much consequence, has – at the very least – made a huge impression around the world. People, businesses and institutions are now busily readying themselves for the apparent tidal wave of technological and economic growth. Serious people now talk of technological singularity – technological progress so extreme it effectively causes our entire knowledge about the world to become invalid, similarly to how usual laws of physics become invalid around a black hole, another kind of singularity.
When moving towards a black hole, we undergo spaghettification, the stretching and thinning of our bodies into long, spaghetti-like shapes. On Earth in 2024, our lives have not yet changed this much, but we might reasonably worry about the overall shape of things. In just the past few years, the world seems to have become much weirder and less predictable. From COVID-19, through the war in Ukraine, and the current AI boom, there seems to have been many more surprises than there have been in the decades before. This “Great Weirding”, as it has been called, does not seem to be stopping any time soon. Catching our breath, we would like to orient ourselves around the new situation and ask: What will come next?
This question immediately directs us to the hottest topic, which is the development of artificial intelligence. Lately, the large language models demonstrated an unprecedented ability of solving problems and performing tasks that they were not explicitly programmed to do, just by learning from the texts on the internet. This breakthrough has led to an important realisation: exposing AI models to a broader spectrum of knowledge and allowing them to perceive the world in a more holistic manner significantly enhances their capabilities. Allowing them to explore and perceive our world more freely, e.g. through 3D data, fosters reasoning abilities, allows for creative behaviours, and a sense of understanding our human world. Models are now even trained on supposed animal languages.
Not only has the data structure changed, but also the methods. Video generation was considered an excellent field to start research into advanced machine intelligence (AMI). V-JEPA uses contrastive learning to enhance the abstract “thinking” capabilities of AI models. On the other side, Fable Studio released a multi-agent simulator capable of rewriting sitcom episodes, forcing a shift towards games in the cinema.
The pace of development is astonishing. In the past few months, the field of video generation has been conquered by SORA, which has opened up previously unimaginable opportunities for the cinema. Soon, previously intractable problems will be overcome through the fusion of quantum computing and machine learning.
Faced with the difficulty of pre-planning and mounting an exhibit of AI art, a field that is likely to significantly change in the few months from concept to realisation, we have decided to announce an open call for visual works in the realm of the future of artificial intelligence. Specifically, we want to explore the futuristic (but realistic) visions, risks, and opportunities of development of AI models. For convenience, we provide an example list of problems in this area, but we hope that participants will surprise us. The winners will be awarded with monetary prizes and their works will be exhibited at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
The title of this exhibition comes from a 1991 speech by Dan Quayle, Vice-President of the United States under George H. W. Bush. In the 1990s, Quayle was frequently a topic of discussion in American media and everyday conversation for his uncanny, AI-like grammatical errors and misspellings.
Selected works will be exhibited at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Participation in the exhibition is necessary to enter the competition. There will be a place for all kinds of forms mentioned in admission criteria. The award ceremony will take place in the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
We accept only visual artworks, no music or texts. Except for that, we have no specific rules regarding the form of artworks, as they may include images, videos, sculptures, installations and even live performances, as long as they touch the problem of the future of AI. We anticipate that AI will have been used in some way to create artworks, but we can also consider promising submissions that use only conventional methods. For more details and rules of admission, please refer to the competition terms and conditions.
Main Festival Prize:
Students’ Prize: 1000 PLN, awarded to the best work selected by the students of the Academy of Fine Arts.
1 August
Opening of the AI Art Competition
30 September, 23:59 (AoE)
Deadline for AI Art Competition Submissions
11 October
Announcement of the Top 9 Submitted Works
31 October, 18:00 (UTC+01:00)
Opening of the AI Art Exhibition
31 October to 11 November
Duration of the AI Art Exhibition
9 November, 19:00 (UTC+01:00)
Announcement of Competition Winners
The exact guidelines for preparing your work can be found here.
You can contact us at aiart@mlinpl.org in case you have any further questions regarding the Competition. We look forward to your submissions and wish you good luck!