Artists always react to the times in which they live. They may celebrate them or criticize them, often trying to change them. But this is the first time in history that technology controlled by private companies is offering to replace the work of writers, musicians, illustrators and visual artists. What impact will generative AI have on how we create art and how we understand what art is for? How will it affect the role of the artist in the future and the conditions under which artists will work? Jan Svenungsson tackles these questions, investigating what AI might do for art, and what it might change, circling the core issue of what it is in human art-making that cannot be replaced.

Jan Svenungsson, born 1961 in Lund, is a Berlin-based visual artist whose work combines conceptual elements and an interest in language with a deep fascination for the act of making by hand. Educated at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (1984-89) and the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques in Paris (1988-89), he has been professor and head of the Department of Drawing and Printmaking at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna since 2011.