Shaping AI to make sure the art of the future retains a human touch

It is clear that AI’s power is immense – but what does it mean for the future on human creativity and expression?

Patricia-Ann Young speaks to Drew Hemment, professor of data arts and society at Edinburgh University, about how humans and AI can together create groundbreaking art.

Can you tell us about your work bridging art, technology and society?

I am an artist and researcher who specialises in opening up new areas where technology meets culture. I founded the UK’s festival for digital culture in 1995, and was director for 25 years, before stepping back to take on a post at the University of Edinburgh. I now lead research programmes between there and The Alan Turing Institute in London, bringing together artists, humanities scholars and scientists to explore alternative approaches to artificial intelligence. While my research connects me with partners internationally, my home is in north Fife, on the banks of the beautiful River Tay.

What is experiential AI and how are artists using it?

Experiential AI brings together artists and scientists to create more meaningful and interpretable AI systems. Instead of focusing solely on making AI more powerful through massive datasets and complex algorithms, we explore how human creativity and machine intelligence can work together in ways that make sense to people.

Working with my research collaborator Matjaz Vidmar and the team, we’ve developed tools that give artists direct creative control over AI systems, rather than just having them type prompts into a black box. Artists can work with their own carefully selected images and texts, fine-tuning small AI models they can genuinely shape and understand. This is quite different from mainstream AI tools that are trained on vast amounts of data scraped from the internet without creators’ consent.

What is The New Real Observatory?

It’s an AI platform we’ve developed to help artists explore how machines and humans might together make sense of our changing planet. Rather than just analysing environmental data, it creates a space where artistic insight and machine learning can work together in novel ways.

The platform works with key environmental measures drawn from climate monitoring services. Artists can shape how the AI organises and connects different aspects of environmental data in its latent space, focusing on patterns that matter to their artistic vision. What makes the Observatory unique is this deep integration of artistic thinking into how the AI operates. Artists can explore climate scenarios while shaping how the system understands and represents these futures, leading to genuine collaboration between human creativity and machine learning.

What artistic projects have you been involved with?

Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of commissioning, presenting and creating artworks that have toured internationally and won awards. Through The New Real Observatory, I was delighted to work with Kasia Molga, an artist I have commissioned to create a number of major artworks in past years.

Her new work, How to Find the Soul of a Sailor, emerges as both memorial and prophecy. In a collection of weathered sailing diaries, Kasia found more than just memories of her father – she discovered a baseline for measuring how profoundly our oceans are changing. Having grown up on ships, she used The New Real Observatory to imagine how her father might describe those same seas in 2084, 100 years after he began his diaries.

At the Edinburgh opening, I was deeply moved by the immersive power of the installation. Viewers found themselves on the bridge of a ship, surrounded by synthetic projections of future seas, while bilingual narratives in both English and Polish created an environment that bridged past and future, memory and speculation. The most profound moment for Kasia was seeing her father’s handwriting recreated – writing that both connected her to him and gestured toward future environmental conditions. The work transforms climate data from numbers into something deeply personal, creating an extraordinary meditation on how environmental change might transform the very language we use to describe our relationship with the sea.

There’s a lot of mixed messaging about AI. What’s your view on its development?

We’re at a critical moment.

While there has been careful work on AI safety over many years, the geopolitical race for AI supremacy risks undermining these efforts. The environmental impact of mainstream AI is a major concern, and there’s troubling centralisation in the industry, where just a handful of companies have the resources to develop frontier AI.

However, other approaches are possible. While many have rejected AI, I believe it is now irreversibly part of our world. Rather than standing aside, I want to actively shape it for the better. Long before the AI boom, a community of artists were already changing how we think about AI, combining insight, activism and creative exploration. These artists help us imagine alternative futures and champion ethical, community-led approaches to AI.