Art with agency: artificial intelligence as an interactive medium

With recent advancements in AI capabilities, much analytical and media attention has focused on its ability to produce art. A less explored element is how artists create AI models for interactive artworks. This paper will argue that adopting AI systems has expanded the interactive art form by generating new modes of engagement. Interactive art creates meaning through co-creation between artworks, audiences, and artists. AI’s ability to create independent systems that learn and respond to stimuli allows artists to facilitate dynamic relationships between their works and viewers. This paper will focus on Ian Cheng’s 2018–2019 digital AI installation, BOB (Bag of Belief), as a case study to demonstrate the potential of AI to generate these dynamic relationships. The work consists of a creature with a digital body that interacts with its environment, and an AI model with the appearance of sentience that allows it to act independently and adapt to stimuli. BOB’s AI model increases unpredictability and agency, encouraging social rather than tool-like interactions. Granting artworks increased control and agency represents not a new art form, but a development for interactive art that generates new interaction methods between artworks and audiences. This facilitates exploration into novel themes, including relationships between human and nonhuman intelligences, different models of the mind, and how artworks are understood as new technologies enable them to act independently.