In the AI Era, Try Lending Students Art – The Messenger

When the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA reached an agreement with Hollywood studios to end their strike, it resolved one of the last sticking points: issues around artificial intelligence (AI). When I heard the news, I was busy hanging up a valuable work of art on my dorm room wall. With a hammer in my hand and a nail in my mouth, I found myself reflecting on the endlessly challenging relationship between art and technology — which is exactly what should be happening on campuses across this country.
Let me explain. Each fall, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) gives students a remarkable opportunity: We get to choose one piece from the List Arts Center’s special collection to keep in our dorm rooms for the entire school year. It is a radical experiment in shaping young people’s relationship with art — casting art not as something to puzzle over behind glass at a museum, but as something to live with, day after day.
Three years into my time at MIT, I’m convinced the program works well. Our relationship with art changes from the moment we walk into the gallery. As students wander, pondering what to take home, conventional measures of fame, monetary worth, and even beauty fall away, and the only question that matters becomes: Does this piece speak to you, personally?
And something always does — as if it were put there just for you. You pull the work off the museum wall with the trepidation of a first kiss; you all but embrace it as you walk it home. As fall turns to winter, your chosen work becomes an intimate part of your life. It hangs by you when you wake up and when you go to bed — when you are smiling and sobbing, hungry and hung-over — lit sometimes in breathtaking twilight and sometimes in your phone’s midnight glow. By spring, the cracks in the paint become old friends you can’t imagine living without, and when it comes time to return your piece, you bid it a fond good-bye.
Art lending programs have run for decades at a number of institutions — including Williams, Kenyon, and the University of Minnesota — but this year’s offering at MIT is special. It comes at a time when art is reckoning with powerful new generative AI technologies, and at an institution where much of that technology was developed. As writers and artists sue AI companies on copyright grounds, as AI books and voices transform our culture, and as schools and companies frantically institute policies around AI use, it is easy to forget just what’s at stake when we talk about “AI art.”
Art lending programs remind students of the value of art beyond being pretty, famous, or expensive. That’s an essential part of an education, really: Beyond introducing students to art history to fulfill “gen ed” requirements, a liberal arts education should teach students that art is personal, something you can turn to in the inevitable moments of loneliness, loss, and grief that characterize every human life. It should raise a citizenry that values and even collects art later in life — not as a decoration, not as an investment, not as a status symbol, but as a lifeline.
Of course, not everyone gets to have this relationship with art right now. The “art world” can feel like a foreign country, impenetrable to those without passports of unimaginable wealth and cultural capital. A trip to a museum can be alienating and even embarrassing: like role-playing an elite lifestyle under the watchful eye of guards and cameras. By trusting students to touch (and be touched by) the pieces they steward, art lending programs make a healthy relationship with art accessible to young people like me, who otherwise could never afford or even imagine it.
It’s not just those students who benefit from that — we all do. Such experiences can inspire future AI researchers to work closely with artists when inventing new products and modes of expression, persuade future CEOs to engage with and value creative professionals, provoke future artists to reflect on how technology has affected art through history, and empower future policymakers to consult with both scientists and artists when analyzing complex social-technical-economic issues we can hardly imagine today. More broadly, such experiences bring us closer to a society where the sciences and arts exist not in tension, but as a dual driving force for positive change.
My peers in college will be running this country someday, and it won’t be an easy job. Personal encounters with great art can help them prepare. I wish every student in this country had access to a student art lending program — no matter how modest the collection, no matter how STEM- or humanities-focused the campus. And I wish we treated hanging up paintings as the hands-on learning-by-doing that it is: lab work for learning to live.
Kartik Chandra is a Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and a Hertz Fellow, a PD Soros Fellow and a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project.

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