AI Art Exhibition Vandalized at Champlain College 

Art vandalism happens. The reasons vary: Some offenders get a thrill out of anonymous destruction, or they want to take an artist’s creations down a notch. Others just dislike the art on display. But sometimes art vandals are trying to make an impassioned point.

That was the case at Champlain College in Burlington over the holiday break. In the student-run Stair Nook Gallery, senior Jaime Klingsberg, a creative media major, had installed his final project for a class last semester on professional practices: a projection slideshow of 30 images of landscapes he had created using AI technology that he had modified.

Over the break, Klingsberg got an email from his professors and Champlain College Art Gallery director and curator Wylie Garcia: Someone had stolen the thumb drive from the projector and written “AI” in a circle with a slash through it in black marker on the wall where the images had been projected. A smaller message below it read “AI IS THEFT!”

Klingsberg’s artwork was part of the class’ larger exhibition, called “Unconscious Imagination,” the rest of which was upstairs in the main gallery. To his knowledge, Klingsberg’s work was the only one on display that used AI. Before the new semester began, staff painted over the vandalism and reinstalled the work as a laptop slideshow in the main gallery.

The issue of AI and art has recently seized widespread attention with the availability of open-source text-to-image generators — such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney — that allow users to instantly create images from text prompts. These generators are trained on millions of text-image pairs drawn from the internet, many from art created by hand but stripped of attribution.
Klingsberg used Stable Diffusion, he said, installing it in a way that “gave me more freedom to tweak the settings and … some of the ways it reacts to the prompts.”

Klingsberg, who also draws, paints and composes electronic music, said he was “not totally surprised” at the vandalism.

“Especially recently, I’ve seen a lot of news about people being upset about AI art. A lot of it [is] from artists. I sympathize with artists’ [claims that] people using AI are able to take other people’s ideas. But I think people do that with or without AI,” he said.

In an opinion piece defending AI art that he wrote but has yet to find a publisher for, Klingsberg likened his position to Alfred Stieglitz’s 19th-century defense of photography as an art.

“My AI art is founded in my understanding and love for the history of art, my appreciation of compositional technique, and ultimately in what artists from Stieglitz to Piet Mondrian, when their techniques were met with harsh criticism for deviating from current norms, have referred to as the real purpose of art: evoking a bone-shaking truth in one’s soul,” he wrote.
Garcia, who just started as director and curator on November 30, agreed that the vandalism incident “made sense.” AI is “definitely a hot-button topic,” she said, citing a recent Instagram trend in AI-generated self-portraits and “so many articles being written about this.”

Burlington City Arts will tackle the subject in an exhibition titled “Co-Created: The Artist in the Age of Intelligent Machines,” opening on February 10, and a panel discussion on the ethical implications of AI on March 29.

Garcia, a painter who specializes in canvases filled with colorful flower blooms, said she doesn’t know enough about AI to be for or against it. But regarding the main objection about intellectual property theft, she noted that, as an artist, “the way I’ve gathered my info is through observation of other people’s work, things that are out there” — a process not far from AI training.

Klingsberg, who will graduate Champlain with a fine arts degree, noted that his AI art is informed by his study of art history.
The landscapes, which range in style from painterly to photographic to fantasy-like, often feature a foregrounded human figure who surveys the scene with his or her back to the viewer — a compositional device known as a Rückenfigur. Klingsberg took the famous exemplar, Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” and used the first three words of its title as a prompt to generate landscapes by the thousands. (Other prompts he used included “a bunch of text about symmetrical lines.”) He selected the best 30 for display.

“I think artists using AI have a responsibility to use it in a creative way,” Klingsberg said. Much of what is being made is “not interesting,” he continued. “There’s a lot of focus on making super-realistic things — on whether AI can make hands properly or a dog that looks like it’s doing what a normal dog does. [But] there are ways to use [AI] to create an interesting abstraction that’s artistic. That also takes a lot of work and technique.”
Garcia said the college is working on a response to the vandalism and the larger issue of AI in creative output — a subject that affects many of Champlain’s students studying gaming, music and more.

“I feel badly that Jaime’s work was vandalized,” she said, “but at the same time it allows us to open up a conversation [about AI] and explore all sides of it. It’s important to stay curious around it.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story included an incorrect date for Burlington City Arts' panel discussion on the ethical implications of AI.