In a darkened room, a fractured symphony of rattles, hums and warbles bounces off the walls – like an orchestra tuning up in some parallel universe. If you look closely there is a small fragment of a performer. In the centre of the room, visitors hover around a raised plinth, craning to glimpse the brains behind the operation. Under a magnifying lens sit two white blobs, like a tiny pair of jellyfish. Together, they form the lab-grown "mini-brain" of the late US musician Alvin Lucier – composing a posthumous score in real time.

This blog post is an excerpt from my doctoral dissertation, "'What makes a great story?': Multidisciplinary and international perspectives on digital stories created by youth formerly in foster care in Canada" (York University, 11 Apr. The debate about whether or not to work with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies because they are "good," or "bad" is overly simplistic and lacks a critical lens. As history conveys, one can infer that artists and technologists are going to try working with AI despite, or because of these challenges. AI systems like "Dall:E" that translate words and sentences into images, have solidified concerns about representation, specifically of gender and race raised early in the advent of AI-based data visualization (Nicholas, 2022). Nevertheless, I believe that it is necessary for women and non-binary people -- especially racialized women -- to begin to explore these technologies as a way of claiming this space and defining the ethical implications of AI.

After a couple of weeks of experimentation, I realised the AI had the potential to describe imaginary artworks. To my delight, I discovered I could prompt it to write the kind of text you see on a wall label next to a painting in an art gallery. This would prove to be the start of a fascinating collaborative journey with GPT-3 and a suite of other AI art tools, leading to work that has ranged from a physical sculpture of toilet plungers to full-size oil paintings on the wall of a Mayfair art gallery. In recent months, AI-generated art has provoked much debate about whether it will be bad news for artists. There's little doubt that there will be disruptive changes ahead, and there are still important questions about bias, ethics, ownership and representation that need to be answered.

AI is here to take your job. For some, where repetitive tasks remain core to their work, this may already be true. Well, if you follow some of the latest trends in AI, there is reason to be mindful: AI now writes novels, produces art, and informs UX design. Artists are even fighting to keep AI from stealing their work. So, at a quick glance, you'll be going toe-to-toe in the art gallery and on the bookshelves with robotic creators soon enough.

Embodied agents, trained to explore and navigate indoor photorealistic environments, have achieved impressive results on standard datasets and benchmarks. So far, experiments and evaluations have involved domestic and working scenes like offices, flats, and houses. In this paper, we build and release a new 3D space with unique characteristics: the one of a complete art museum. We name this environment ArtGallery3D (AG3D). Compared with existing 3D scenes, the collected space is ampler, richer in visual features, and provides very sparse occupancy information.

Residents in the Bronx, New York stopped dead in their tracks as a four-legged robotic dog trotted down East 227th Street Tuesday. The machine, called Digidog, was accompanying human officers responding to a home invasion and barricade situation. Digidog joined the New York Police Department last year, which changed the machine's yellow color to blue and black and gave it a new name - it was initially named'Spot' by its creators Boston Dynamics. The robotic dog, according to reports, was sent inside a building in the Bronx to climb stairs and investigate an area for a hostage situation – but no one was found. The videographer, Daniel Valls of FreedomNews.tv, said the dog responded to a home invasion and barricaded situation on East 227th Street near White Plains Road in Wakefield. Digidog was designed for emergency situations that would otherwise be too dangerous for human officers.

Forget'a bull in a china shop' -- tomorrow, members of the public will be able to take remote control of an armed, paintball-firing robotic dog in an art gallery. Quirky, chaos-loving, New York-based start-up MSCHF (pronounced'mischief') are behind the campaign, which highlights the risk of such machines being misused. MSCHF mounted the compressed air gun onto the back one of Boston Dynamics' $75,000 Spot robots and will be linking its controls to a public website. Spot's'rampage' will begin at 13:00 EST (18:00 GMT) on February 24, 2021 and every two minutes the site will hand over control to a different smartphone user. The event is being held in a small art gallery constructed in MSCHF's Brooklyn offices -- one populated by paintings, vases, boxes and the firm's past products. Boston Dynamics have criticised MSCHF's paintball-firing application of their robot -- calling it the stunt a'spectacle' that'fundamentally misrepresents' Spot.

Boston Dynamics has racked up hundreds of millions of YouTube views with viral clips of its futuristic, legged robots dancing together, doing parkour, and working in a warehouse. A group of meme-spinning pranksters now wants to present a more dystopian view of the company's robotic tech. They added a paintball gun to Spot, the company's doglike machine, and plan to let others control it inside a mocked-up art gallery via the internet later this week. The project, called Spot's Rampage, is the work of MSCHF (pronounced "mischief," of course), an internet collective that regularly carries out meme-worthy pranks. Previous MSCHF stunts include creating an app that awarded $25,000 to whomever could hold a button down for the longest; selling "Jesus Shoes" sneakers with real holy water in the soles (Drake bought a pair); developing an astrology-based stock-picking app; and cutting up and selling individual spots from a Damian Hirst painting.

U.K.-based Pimloc has closed a £1.4 million ( $1.8 million) seed funding round led by Amadeus Capital Partners. Existing investor Speedinvest and other unnamed shareholders also participated in the round. The 2016-founded computer vision startup launched a AI-powered photo classifier service called Pholio in 2017 -- pitching the service as a way for smartphone users to reclaim agency over their digital memories without having to hand over their data to cloud giants like Google. It has since pivoted to position Pholio as a "specialist search and discovery platform" for large image and video collections and live streams (such as those owned by art galleries or broadcasters) -- and also launched a second tool powered by its deep learning platform. This product, Secure Redact, offers privacy-focused content moderation tools -- enabling its users to find and redact personal data in visual content.

This article originally appeared in YFS Magazine. The art world has become a more inclusive, engaging place for newcomers and connoisseurs alike -- and we owe technology much of the credit. From machine learning and personalization to augmented reality and blockchain integrations, new technologies continue to reshape and reimagine what the art world can be and who has access to it. Many people still believe consumers won't buy art without experiencing it in-person. Online art galleries are flourishing, however, and new tools make it easier than ever for potential buyers to get up close and personal with works of art that could be thousands of miles away.