Grayson Perry has said he doesn’t “really mind” if his work is used to train AI models, adding that throughout his entire career he had been “ripping off” others.
Speaking at the Charleston literature festival, held on the grounds of the former home of the Bloomsbury Group artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, the artist jokingly referred to himself as “the world champion of cultural appropriation”.
“I’ve never worried about if anyone wants to use my work in a lecture or whatever they want to do with it,” he said. Nor does he expect any money from those uses – partly because much of his work’s value comes from it being “physical” and “often unique”.
However, the Turner prize-winning artist added that he was in “a luxurious position, being well-known”. He said he had never tried asking AI to make an image in the style of Grayson Perry.
“Maybe I should ask that, that would be interesting,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get cross then, maybe I’ll be immediately signing a letter.”
The 65-year-old said he had been “tinkering” with AI, and his latest exhibition, Delusions of Grandeur at the Wallace Collection, includes AI-generated self-portraits. “My experience of AI is that it’s not that good yet, so don’t worry,” he said, adding that he was “not sure” if the models would ever become “amazingly creative”.
But he does think AI is “going to do all the mediocre stuff” in the future. “If you’re a birthday card designer, you’re fucked.”
Perry said he had recently used an AI tool and prompted it to create simply “an artwork”. The result showed a canvas that “looked like someone had just put all the colours on there”, he said. “I thought it was the perfect metaphor for what the internet does. It smooshes everything together into a bland paste. It does that with all culture.”
He said AI art “went through this brilliant phase” when it tended to have a hallucinatory, “surreal, nice, interesting” quality to it. Now, though, AI had become “almost too good”, the artist said, describing it as being like “a very, very pedantic 14-year-old” that says: “Look at me, I can do a very realistic drawing”!
Perry also said he believed “narrative is the most potent form of human art” – which is why he creates characters for himself – Claire, Alan Measles and most recently his alter ego “Shirley Smith”, who features as the “artist” behind his Wallace Collection works.
He said he was “a bit envious” of artists of the past who “had religion” linked to “stories that everybody understood”, which they could reference in their work.
Though he is “not spiritual”, he said he loved the idea of religion. “Spirituality has a relationship to religion like creativity has a relationship to art,” he said, adding that in both cases he was more interested in something definite than “vague thoughts” or “fuzzy woo woo”.
