‘I sent AI to art school!’ The postmodern master who taught a machine to beef up his old work

General
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Renowned postmodern artist David Salle has embarked on a groundbreaking collaboration with artificial intelligence to reimagine his earlier works. In his latest exhibition, “Some Versions of Pastoral,” at Thaddaeus Ropac in London, Salle presents a series of paintings that blend traditional techniques with AI-generated elements.​

Partnering with engineers from tech startup EAT__Works and the creator of the AI-powered app Wand, Salle trained an AI model using scans of his own gouache paintings and works from artists like Warhol, Hopper, and de Chirico. The AI learned to replicate the textured, gestural qualities of Salle’s style, resulting in hybrid images that abstractly reinterpret his earlier compositions.​

While the AI rapidly synthesizes concepts that might take artists years to develop, Salle views it as a tool rather than a replacement. He believes that the collaboration raises important questions about originality, authorship, and the evolving relationship between human creativity and machine intelligence.​
The exhibition runs until June 8, 2025.​

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ethically i’m not sure how to feel ngl - he used AI art for his OWN artwork, so it should be alright (?) but it also uses training material from other works of art, so there really is an argument for either

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Yeah, this one definitely sits in that ethical gray zone. On one hand, it’s cool (and kind of meta) that Salle is feeding his own past work into the AI — it feels like an artist having a dialogue with their younger self, just through a machine. That’s a pretty wild, postmodern move in itself.

But then there’s the part where the AI is also trained on works by Warhol, Hopper, de Chirico… and that’s where things get murky. Even if it’s done with artistic intent, using the stylistic DNA of other artists without direct consent raises legit questions about appropriation — especially when the AI model can’t differentiate between homage and replication.