Pushing the Boundaries of AI Art: an Immodest Proposal

Recent advances across the field of machine learning have created a world in which the existent, publicly available models, training tools, and compute enable small entities unprecedented access to model building and deployment. This development simultaneously creates a number of novel dangers, and also an opportunity for relatively underresourced artistic cooperatives and even individual artists, to create interactive and performance art outside the scope we conventionally see in the ``AI Art'' community today. Inspired by this development, we argue for the artistic merit of expanding the scope of what we think of AI Art far past the scope of what we have seen exhibited in the past in venues such as NeurIPS and in museums, toward art that is more directly provocative, that centers the individuals rather than the "AI", and that engages with model training rather than simply inference. As a proof of concept, we describe a fictional interactive exhibit, the Penametron, which invites the users to interact with, and contribute to the training of, a model that estimates the length of a (fully clothed) visitor's penis.