The world's first AI art museum will be a big test for the technology

AI art still poses a lot of questions. Is it legal if it's made with AI image generators that were trained on other people's work? Can it be copyrighted or does it create a free for all where anyone can reproduce an AI-generated image for whatever purpose. Is it even art or merely pastiche?

But perhaps one of the biggest questions regarding the tenability of AI art is, do people actually like it and want to engage with it? While the question of copyright in AI art is being dealt with in the courts, the matter of whether anyone wants to look at it will be put to the test by a new AI art museum in Los Angeles called Dataland.

Dataland is intended to be the world's first permanent museum dedicated entirely to AI art. It's expected to open next year at a prime location beside Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art and The Broad, putting it at the centre of the city's art scene.

One of the founders is the AI artist Refik Anadol, who teaches design at the University of California, Los Angeles, and whose shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and Serpentine in London have already caused controversy (partly because of his use of NFTs as well as AI). Anadol says the new AI art museum museum, which is expected to open late next year, will showcase “intersection of human imagination and the creative potential of machines”.

As well as proving the public interest and popularity of AI art, Anadol also hopes to show that it can be ethical. That means showcasing models and datasets that don't use other artists' copyrighted work without their permission. The first exhibitions will feature works generated only using Anadol's own open-source Large Nature Model, which was built with data from the natural world gathered by the Smithsonian and the UK Natural History Museum, among others. It's expected that the museum will open in late 2025.

Another big criticism of AI is the amount of resources it uses. On this topic, Anadol says that the museum will use a sustainable energy park in Oregon to provide energy for its AI tools without the use of fossil fuels.

For more on AI art, and how we got here, see our history of AI art.