[On 21 February, I reposted the transcript of a PBS News Hour report, “Replicating Classic Art Works,” that covered the use of computers to reproduce works of art. Now I’m taking a look at the employment of computers to create art with artificial intelligence. Among other questions this development raises, as you’ll read, is “Is it art?”
[It’s too early for a definitive answer yet—art critic Jerry Saltz says we’ll have to wait and see where this effort takes us—but you can read about one “artist’s” work and notions and decide what you think. (You can always change your mind later.)
[Take note that there are links to several additional CBS news stories on this subject embedded in the two 60 Minutes reports republished on Rick On Theater. I recommend reading them as well.]
“AI ARTIST REFIK
ANADOL USES MASSIVE DATASETS
SHOWN AROUND THE
WORLD”
by Sharyn Alfonsi,
Michael Baltierra, Aliza Chasan,
Erin DuCharme, and Chrissy
Hallowell
[This report was a segment on 60 Minutes (CBS News) on 22 February 2026. The online transcript has a video of the broadcast.]
Refik Anadol [b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey] paints with what he calls “a thinking brush[.]”
The 40-year-old Turkish American is not an artist in the traditional sense; he uses a computer, massive amounts of data and artificial intelligence to create immersive, ever-changing visuals.
[Anadol attended Istanbul Bilgi University, where he received a BA in photography and video in 2009 and an MFA in visual communication in 2011. In 2014 he earned an MFA in design media arts at UCLA.]
His work, where man meets machine, has been embraced by some of the world’s most prestigious museums, auction houses and collectors and has made Anadol a darling of the tech world. He’s teamed up with Google, MIT and Microsoft to create large, public installations. Supporters call his work revolutionary. But critics question whether art created with AI can truly have meaning, arguing it’s devoid of human emotion, lived experience and intent.
“These are all, I think, true,” Anadol said. “That’s why I believe, [in] human-machine collaboration. We are really completing that bridge where I feel like most likely where we are going as humanity, and just be sure that it’s done right, that it’s shared right, and celebrate this new age of imagination.”
What is AI art
Anyone able to hop online can generate images with AI by inputting a prompt into an AI image generator. What Anadol does is different. For more than a decade, he says he’s worked to ensure his process balances human creativity and machine intelligence, driven half by man, half by machine.
“In my mind’s eye I can compute, I can imagine geometrically what exactly the mind’s eye is looking for,” he said.
To create his work, Anadol and his team curate enormous datasets: sometimes hundreds of millions of images. For one project, he used 200 million photos of Earth, including data from NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration, United States’ federal agency responsible for the civil space program and research in aeronautics and space exploration]. For another, he curated more than 150 million images of California landscapes.
“When I think about data as a pigment, I think it doesn’t need to dry. It can move in any shape, in any form, any color, and texture,” he said.
The images he and his team curate are converted into data points representing color, texture and shape. They’re then plotted into multi-dimensional space. The AI system learns patterns from that data, and then creates its own images.
The images, Anadol said, “only exist in the mind of a machine.” He then applies algorithms to blend those outputs into his signature fluid style.
Something worthy of attention, or “a half-million-dollar screensaver?”
Some in the art world have embraced Anadol’s work. His large-scale installations have been displayed on landmarks including Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Casa Batlló in Barcelona and the Sphere in Las Vegas [see Sphere (24 and 27 December 2023)]. His pieces have sold for upwards of $1 million at auction. In 2022, The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, commissioned a 24-foot installation called “Unsupervised,” which filled the museum’s lobby [19 November 2022-29 October 2023].
Visitors sat in front of “Unsupervised” for hours, transfixed by what they saw, according to recently-retired museum director Glenn Lowry [b. 1954].
Anadol trained an AI system on publicly available metadata from the museum’s entire collection[.] He says the finished work, “Unsupervised,” reimagines 200 years of art.
“He wrote some algorithms that allowed the data from one object to evolve into the data of another object to become yet a third object or a fourth object never before seen,” Lowry said. “I think people found it deeply satisfying.”
Museum visitors typically spend about 28 seconds looking at great works of art, studies have found. Anadol said viewers spent an average of 38 minutes looking at “Unsupervised.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Jerry Saltz [b. 1951] doesn’t think the lingering crowds are evidence of artistic success. He called “Unsupervised” a “half-million-dollar screensaver.”
“How long you spend with a work of art is not a sign of success so much as your willingness to get quiet within yourself, go to uncomfortable places, become comfortable in those places, asking yourself questions,” Saltz said. “In front of a Refik Adanol, you sit down, go into a stupor, and you don’t have to think much. You go, ‘Oh, there goes a painting that looks a little like Renoir [Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919); French Impressionist artist], morphing into one that looks like Picasso [Pablo Picasso (1881-1973); Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theater designer], morphing into an amoeba.’”
Most of it is “crap,” Saltz said. But he cautioned against overreaction, noting that most art made during the Renaissance was also “crap.”
AI, he says, is still in its infancy.
“AI is one day old. And we’re already having conversations, ‘I hate it, you love it. It’s good, it’s bad.’ It’s new, it’s young.”
Whether AI becomes a transformative artistic medium, he said, will depend less on the machine — and more on the human using it.
Lowry, who ran the Museum of Modern Art for three decades [1995-2025], said skepticism around AI mirrors the reaction to the advent of photography 200 years ago.
“When suddenly the human hand is removed from the making of an image, what does that mean? And I think artificial intelligence is analogous to that. But I don’t think you can stop technology,” he said.
[See my post on Gres Gallery in which, in Part 1, there’s a brief discussion in 1957 of the distinction between the official customs criteria for “sculpture,” which had to be “hand-made” and “man-made” (and therefore designated “art”), and newly conceived modern abstract sculpture that was largely “machine-made” (and therefore labeled “manufactured” or “fabricated” metal or “new decorative art pieces”).]
Theft allegations
Some artists argue AI systems are built using copyrighted works without permission from the original creators. New York-based artist and author Molly Crabapple [b. 1983] has called the training of generative AI models on copyrighted artwork “the greatest art heist in history.”
“When we talk about art heists, typically, we’re talking about one painting being taken from a museum, two, three [paintings.] They stole billions and billions of images,” she said.
[In "AI in the Arts Is the Destruction of the Film Industry. We Can't Go Quietly" by Justine Bateman (4 June 2023), I quote a passage from “Artificial Intelligence, Real Consequences,” an article in the Spring 2023 issue of SAG-AFTRA magazine (vol 12, no. 2), that explains the TV and film actors’ position on this same issue (which is also shared by the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA), the union of television and film writers, who went on strike in 2023 in part over this matter):
As the technology [i.e., AI] improves at a dizzying speed, the laws protecting copyright and other intellectual rights will be tested. SAG-AFTRA emphasizes that governments should not create new copyright or other IP [intellectual property] exemptions that allow AI developers to exploit creative works, or professional voices and likenesses, without permission or compensation. AI that generates text and art doesn’t create it from nothing; it is trained on the hard work, brilliance, inspiration, sweat and creativity of countless artists — artists who have financial obligations and families, and who deserve to be compensated for their efforts [underscoring added].
[WGA’s sister unions either joined the writers on the picket lines or had scheduled votes to authorize doing so before the settlement with the producers was reached. Meanwhile, production in Hollywood was shut down.]
“No artist has been asked for their consent. No artist has received compensation,” Crabapple said. “In fact, we don’t even see credit.”
AI companies have told lawmakers that what they are doing falls under fair use, a legal doctrine which allows copyrighted works to be used without permission under certain circumstances. They claim AI is studying and learning, just as a human would. But a group of artists have filed a class action lawsuit against four of the AI companies that make art generators, accusing them of copyright infringement, among other things.
Anadol said he understands his fellow artist’s concerns with commercial AI image generators. Since 2020, he said he’s only worked with what he calls “ethically sourced” datasets
“This is the most important part of art making with AI. It takes a lot of teamwork, a lot of thinking, research. We always start with permission, then we know exactly where information comes from,” Anadol said.
What’s next for AI art
Anadol is now building DATALAND, a 20,000-square-foot museum dedicated to AI art, in downtown Los Angeles.
Visitors can expect to wear devices around their necks that pump out different AI-generated scents, such as rain and flowers, to accompany what they’re seeing. Anadol says eventually, another device will monitor viewers’ vital statistics. That data will be used to change the art in real time.
When DATALAND opens this spring, it will be the world’s first museum devoted entirely to AI arts: a massive canvas to celebrate Anadol’s optimism about technology. Anadol insists AI is not a threat to art, but a tool to create works no human could create alone.
[Sharyn Alfonsi first appeared on 60 Minutes, the CBS News flagship broadcast, in 2015. She has been honored with numerous accolades over her career, including an Emmy for Outstanding Recorded News Program with 60 Minutes, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Silver Baton, a Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service in Television Journalism and a Gracie Award for National On-Air Talent in News or News Magazine.
[Alfonsi joined 60 Minutes from ABC News as a New York-based reporter who appeared regularly on Good Morning America, World News Tonight and Nightline. She was the co-anchor of the ABC franchise “Made in America” where she revealed that the uniforms to be worn by U.S. Olympic athletes were made in China. Her investigation for Nightline showed the often cruel world of the puppy mill industry, exposing factory-like breeding facilities in the Amish country of Pennsylvania.
[Aliza Chasan is a Digital Content Producer for 60 Minutes and CBSNews.com, based in New York. She earned a master’s degree in journalism from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in 2015, focusing on urban news during her time there. Chasan started her journalism career in New Jersey, where she reported on local news. Before coming to 60 Minutes and CBS News, Chasan covered breaking news, politics and local news at outlets including PIX11 News, the New York Daily News, Inside Edition and DNAinfo. Chasan won an Online News Association award for her work on The Missing with NY City News Service.]
* *
* *
“WHEN AI BECOMES A
PAINTBRUSH, IS IT ART?”
by Brit McCandless
Farmer
[Linked to the report posted above was a piece on 60 Minutes Overtime, the CBS News website on which stories broadcast on-air are discussed in further detail, posted on 22 February 2026.]
This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi stepped into a new frontier of artistic expression: the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence-generated art. She profiled Refik Anadol, the 40-year-old Turkish American artist widely regarded as a pioneer of this emerging form.
Anadol doesn’t mix acrylics or sculpt with stone. Instead, he paints with data.
For one recent work, he fed an artificial intelligence model 200 million photographs of Earth, drawing heavily from archives provided by NASA. The result is a sweeping, immersive digital installation — a living canvas of color and motion that feels at once cosmic and intimate.
“When I think about data as a pigment,” Anadol told correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, “I think it doesn’t need to dry. It can move in any shape, in any form, any color, and texture.” [See Alfonsi’s report above.]
It’s a poetic description of a process rooted in code. His installations, projected across walls and ceilings, envelop viewers in constantly shifting landscapes generated by machine learning systems trained on vast image libraries. The effect can feel, as Alfonsi put it, “a little trippy.” [See article in the first link in this post above.]
“It is trippy,” Anadol replied. “Because I think as artists we ask what is beyond reality.”
The critics weigh in
Anadol’s work has appeared in some of the world’s most prestigious museums. But as A.I. art moves from tech labs to galleries, the art world is grappling with a bigger question: How do these creations stack up?
Jerry Saltz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for New York Magazine, is both skeptical and curious.
“Right now, AI art seems to be an average of averages,” Saltz told Alfonsi. Algorithms are trained on vast datasets of existing images, themselves products of countless influences. The result, he argues, risks becoming “vaster, and more average,” rather than more profound.
For Saltz, great art emerges from something machines fundamentally lack: lived experience.
“I want the algorithm to experience death,” he said. “I want the algorithm to know the feeling of feeling like you have a fat neck, or bad hair . . . I want to train the algorithm to experience carnality.” Without sex and death, Saltz suggests, there is no art.
And yet, he doesn’t dismiss the technology.
“I like to think of it as a material,” Saltz said. “Artists use materials. A digital file is a material.” To reject A.I. outright, he argued, would be like rejecting oil paint or the novel before engaging with them. “I wish it well. And I would never, ever ignore it.”
Fear, replacement, and ethics
Part of the anxiety surrounding A.I. art is existential. Artists, like professionals in many industries, fear replacement, Saltz said.
“We all have a latent fear of being replaced by AI,” Saltz acknowledged. “I guess I think that we will be on some level.” His prescription isn’t retreat — it’s reinvention. Artists must become “better, or more useful, or more unique at what we do in order to keep our jobs.”
The ethical questions are thornier. Is it fair — or legal — to train an algorithm on the work of other artists?
Saltz thinks so. Artists have always borrowed, referenced, and reinterpreted what came before them.
“There are no laws in art,” Saltz said bluntly. “All art comes from other art.”
Is it art?
Last year, artist Refik Anadol brought his vision to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain [in situ: Refik Anadol, 7 March-10 December 2025]. For that exhibition, he built a custom A.I. model trained on open-access photographs, sketches, and blueprints from the archive of Frank Gehry [1929-2025], the legendary architect who designed the museum itself.
The system processed Gehry’s architectural legacy and reimagined it as a fluid, morphing, digital spectacle.
Saltz once dismissed a similar installation at New York’s Museum of Modern Art as a “glorified lava lamp,” dazzling but ultimately decorative [Unsupervised – see above].
Which raises the central question of this cultural moment: When a machine recombines humanity’s visual history into something new, is that art?
[Brit McCandless Farmer is an award-winning journalist with a career spanning print, broadcast, and digital news. As the digital producer for 60 Minutes at CBS News, Farmer extends the broadcast’s reporting online, giving the 60 Minutes audience a deeper dive into the subjects on television, and helps introduce the news magazine to a new generation of viewers. Her work has been recognized by the Webby, Gracie, Wilbur, and Telly awards.
[Previously,
Farmer worked at the CBS Weekend Evening News and CBS This Morning,
where she produced interviews with presidential candidates, elected officials,
and business leaders. Before joining CBS, she worked at CNN, where she was a
member of a producing and reporting team that won a Peabody Award. She is the immediate past-president of the
Carnegie Mellon Alumni Association Board, a former trustee of Carnegie Mellon
University, and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.]
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