AI is in every single place within the artistic industries proper now: within the hype, within the nervousness, within the instruments themselves. However between the breathless enthusiasm and the fevered backlash, a extra fascinating dialog is occurring. One about what AI can really do within the palms of artists and designers who refuse to take its guarantees at face worth.
On the Royal Faculty of Artwork, that dialog is producing work that’s profitable worldwide awards, exhibiting at main establishments and difficult how we take into consideration expertise’s position in artistic life. Two RCA creatives—one a current graduate, one a present pupil—are approaching AI from very totally different angles. What they share is a refusal to easily settle for the script.
A movie constructed on forgetting
Gregor Petrikovič is a Slovak-British artist and filmmaker who accomplished an MA in Images on the RCA, the place he was a Burberry Design Scholar. His movie, Sincerely, Victor Pike, was lately chosen for New Contemporaries and gained the Colección SOLO AI Award 2024. It was constructed on an audio archive he has been accumulating since 2016: a whole lot of hours of conversations with pals and acquaintances, recorded initially to assist him handle power reminiscence loss.
For years, the recordings simply sat on previous telephones. “I did not have a look at the information for years,” he says. “It was solely after I gathered all my previous telephones and moved every little thing into one folder that I realised: that is utterly overwhelming.”
AI entered the challenge not as a artistic imaginative and prescient however as a sensible resolution. Gregor used it to transcribe the audio and located himself gazing what appeared like movie scripts; paperwork filled with intimate, humorous, typically profound exchanges between individuals who had by no means met one another, however coexisted in his reminiscence.
From there, he turned to AI-generated visuals to deliver the fabric to life, drawn to the glitchy, dreamlike high quality of early generative imagery, which mirrored how reminiscence really works. An undiagnosed, long-term sleep situation had fragmented his recall for 25 years; his mind, he explains, tends to create “placeholders” for issues he cannot bear in mind; a generative technique of its personal.
The result’s a movie that makes use of AI with out celebrating it. Gregor fed his voiceovers into the software program, however curiously, more often than not, the AI merely did not get it. “It could not perceive metaphors, poetry, or the nuances of spoken phrases,” he remembers. “That was an enormous realisation for me: the challenge is in regards to the stuff that AI can’t seize.”
He describes Sincerely, Victor Pike as a “sentimental counter-practice to huge information”. The place surveillance applied sciences flatten us into profiles and promote us issues, his recordings do the alternative; they protect tiny, humorous, irreducible human moments. “While you strip every little thing away, and it is only a voice, you get all these tiny individualities and feelings that come to the floor,” he says. “These applied sciences aren’t going away, however I wish to be there determining how we will use them to truly really feel one thing. Connection is not the explanation these instruments had been constructed, however I believe as artists, that is precisely what we must be utilizing them for.”
Rewriting the narrative
Ramla Anshur has been coming at AI from a special course completely. A present part-time pupil on the MDes Design Futures programme, she additionally works at Accenture as an expertise designer. Her analysis focuses on a deceptively easy query: what occurs when communities which are often topic to AI get to form it as a substitute?
Her curiosity was sparked not by concept however by follow. Working as a dialog designer, she helped practice a pure language processing mannequin for a citizen-facing voice bot. The crew shortly hit the bounds of what their information might seize. “What we could not account for was the varied accents of the service customers, any speech impediments and varied accessibility wants,” she explains. “By not making the aware effort to coach the mannequin on these variations, the implications could be dire to already weak individuals.”
That have, mixed with a design retreat that challenged her to rethink what “success” means in expertise (questioning the dominance of effectivity, velocity and revenue as default metrics), pushed her in the direction of a much bigger query. “It ignited an curiosity in researching what various tech futures might seem like when minoritised communities designed and ruled these applied sciences based mostly on their values, cultures and types of data,” she says.
Ramla lately co-authored a analysis paper proposing a taxonomy of responses to narratives of AI inevitability: the concept, pushed exhausting by the tech business, that AI adoption is a future we should merely adapt to. The paper outlines 4 approaches: Resisting, Refusing, Reclaiming and Reimagining. It’s, primarily, a framework for anybody who desires to push again.
She’s frank in regards to the stress creatives face in 2026. “The AI narrative is offered to us as an inevitable future the place we should soar on if we do not wish to be left behind,” she says. However Ramla has been monitoring public responses to AI-generated content material, and finds the image much more sophisticated than the hype suggests. “The bulk response is one among rejection, disgust and disappointment. Many artists have begun to label their work as ‘Human-made.’ The demand for human artists and design continues to be a necessity.”
Her recommendation to designers and creatives feeling powerless? Organise, keep seen, and do not concede the longer term. “By collective organising, we will start to think about and craft the futures we need: ones that worth human creativity, that embody our cultural and ancestral data, that exist inside planetary boundaries reasonably than exploit.”
The RCA impact
Each Gregor and Ramla credit score the Royal Faculty of Artwork with giving them the mental and inventive foundations for this work, even when, in Gregor’s case, it did not seem like AI in any respect on the time.
“The humorous factor is, I did not really contact AI as soon as whereas I used to be on the RCA,” he says. “I used to be utterly into the analogue world: journaling, 16mm filmmaking, experimenting with Victorian pre-cinema toy mechanisms.” However these early experiments with imperfect, hand-made shifting photographs are what drew him to the glitchy aesthetics of early generative video.
The RCA additionally taught him the right way to suppose in public, he provides. “I needed to learn to present as much as crits and speak brazenly about work that was nonetheless a messy work-in-progress. My tutors helped me detach from the concept of a completed product and give attention to the concepts as a substitute.”
For Ramla, finding out part-time over two years has given her the area to go deep. A standout module, Envisioning Futures, noticed her crew collaborate with the Design Museum’s Futures Observatory to think about more-than-human futures, together with a speculative land council that balanced the wants of all inhabitants, human and in any other case. “These learnings to prioritise justice, regeneration and criticality have formed my work,” she says, “to leverage expertise the place it’s wanted and helpful, versus imposing it.”
Two very totally different practices, one shared conviction. The important thing takeaway? AI is simply as fascinating because the questions you deliver to it. And on the RCA, the questions come first.
Gregor Petrikovič studied MA Images. He was a Burberry Design Scholar and is an alumnus of the Worldwide Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York. His movie Sincerely, Victor Pike gained the Colección SOLO AI Award 2024, has been chosen for New Contemporaries, and has exhibited at IDFA DocLab, Late at Tate Britain, and Sónar+D Barcelona. He’s presently an FLAMIN Fellow at Movie London. Ramla Anshur is presently a part-time pupil within the MDes Design Futures programme. She works at Accenture as an Expertise Designer and co-authored the 2025 analysis paper ‘Resisting, Refusing, Reclaiming, Reimagining: Charting Challenges to Narratives of AI Inevitability’ with We and AI. Ramla was chosen for Catalyst’s Kindling programme which helps tech justice tasks and contains an in-person retreat.
