VENICE.- The skeleton seems to be at the epicenter of a mystifying ritual.

In a new work by French artist Pierre Huyghe, robots powered by artificial intelligence film the unburied remains of a man, and periodically position objects next to it in a ceremony that only they seem to understand. The scene takes place in the Atacama Desert in Chile, one of the planet’s oldest and driest deserts.

“Camata” is on view at the Punta della Dogana – Pinault Collection exhibition space, in a show concurrent with the Venice Biennale (through Nov. 24). It’s a stirring example of the increasing overlap between art and artificial intelligence, or AI.

Those two vowels, placed side by side, seem to present a menace to many disciplines whose practitioners risk being replaced by smart and autonomous machines. Humanity itself could, at some future point, be replaced by superintelligent machines, according to some globally renowned thinkers and philosophers such as Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari and Stephen Hawking.

So why are artists dabbling with AI? And do they risk being extinguished by it?

“There’s always been an attraction, on the part of artists, for chance: something which is beyond your own control, something that liberates you from the finite subject,” said Daniel Birnbaum, a curator who is the artistic director of the digital art production platform Acute Art and a panelist at the Art for Tomorrow conference in Venice this week convened by the Democracy & Culture Foundation with panels moderated by New York Times journalists.

Birnbaum said that Huyghe was among the artists who — rather than “overwhelming us with AI-generated nonsense from the internet” — are interested in exploring “places where nature and artificiality merge,” and where “biological systems and artificial systems somehow collaborate, creating visually strange things.”

In the world at large, Birnbaum acknowledged, there were “frightening scenarios” whereby artificially intelligent systems could control decisions made by governments or the military, and pose grave threats to humanity.

In the creative industries, he said, a number of undertakings could soon be carried out by machines that would mix together the best examples of human creations and deliver reshuffled versions of them. This could be conceivable in the case of quick-hit pop tunes, hastily produced commercial fiction, in-flight magazine content and “mediocre” architecture and design, he noted.

In the case of art, however, Birnbaum said audiences would still be looking for the artist’s metaphorical hand. “They just want to see this human participant” and detect traces of the artist’s “here-and-now-ness,” where the human and the machine “touch each other,” he said.

One of the more talked-about artists in the realm of AI-generated art is Turkish-born Refik Anadol. He was catapulted to global fame in late 2022, when he mounted a forever-shifting computer-driven screen installation in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art in New York — composed of more than 138,000 images and texts sourced from MoMA’s publicly available archive — which ran for nearly a year.

This year, Anadol drew 66,000 visitors in 47 days to “Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive,” an exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries in London where he showed AI-generated works representing underwater landscapes and rainforests. The underwater landscapes were generated by an AI model based on some 135 million coral images, openly accessible online. The rainforest images were produced by another AI model fed with openly available data from the Smithsonian Institution, and the Natural History Museum in London.

It was all part of Anadol’s overarching project to make the invisible visible: to demystify AI, show where the data used in it comes from and trace the origins of the whooshing and undulating images that audiences see on-screen.

In a video interview from his studio in Los Angeles, Anadol described himself as a “nerd, loving computers” who was given a Commodore by his mother when he was 8, and who, from that point on, started “understanding and engaging with a machine as a friend, as a co-creator, as a collaborator.”

He described AI as “the most inspiring technology” that humankind had at its disposal today, and added: “We are living in a renaissance.”

Anadol said every artist wanted to see “what is beyond reality” and “perceive worlds that don’t exist.” AI was a vehicle for the imagination, one that, he said, could represent “hallucinations, dreams, fantasies.”

The technology we are dealing with today is no longer “just a pen, or a printing press,” and “not just a car or a wheel.” Instead, “it is intelligence,” he said. “It is mimicking our reasoning at the moment, and it will evolve. It will turn into something else.” And that “has never happened in our history before.”

Currently, he explained, AI is “50% human, 50% machine.” In the future, he said, AI will be “designed from scratch: to see, to hear, to feel,” and to produce “a living form of art” that will be “a synthetic being.” He said artificial intelligence will take “archives of humanity and what we are leaving behind” — not just an image, text or sound, but “scent, taste, touch” — and convert it into data and memory with which it can create art.

He described AI as “a thinking brush that doesn’t forget, that can remember anything and everything,” and said he would “invite that AI to my studio, and host and cocreate” with it. “I will accept that AI as a human,” he said.

Anadol’s “Echoes of the Earth” exhibit came out of an invitation to show at the Serpentine Galleries by its artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist.

In an interview at his Serpentine office, Obrist recalled that in October 2011, after giving a talk in Marrakech, Morocco, he was approached by a London artist and technologist who said he didn’t understand why museums were not engaging with technology anywhere except on their website. Obrist said he gathered the artist and a group of others for a breakfast round table a few days later, and in 2013, established the Serpentine’s technology division, which today has five curators.

Obrist said he realized that technology ought to be integrated into exhibitions, “that the future might actually not be either/or, the idea that you have physical things in the gallery and digital things online, but that the future is mixed reality.” He said AI art currently consists of collaborations between artists and machines; both are involved.

He recalled that during the Ian Cheng exhibition at the Serpentine in 2018, Cheng filled the Serpentine with a sentient artwork named “BOB (Bag of Beliefs)”: digital, on-screen creatures that had moods and minds of their own.

During the show, Obrist was once awakened at 4 a.m. by the security team at the Royal Parks (the Serpentine is in Kensington Gardens, part of London’s Hyde Park) because the lights had suddenly gone on in the middle of the night: BOB had decided to open the gallery well before the authorized opening time.

Obrist also remembered a guest-book comment in which exhibition visitors said BOB had been “so unfriendly to them, and inhospitable, that they came back,” and were “very grateful that BOB was nice to them the second time around.”

Obrist said the idea of “the artwork as a living organism” could open “all kinds of possibilities.”

So far, he noted, artworks have been immutable and set in stone; even video or film-based installations have traditionally been played on preprogrammed loops. He recalled how, as a young man, he would always see the same two public sculptures every time he passed through the train station in Zurich, where he grew up. Allowing AI to take over in shared spaces “could create a new form of public art,” he said. “It’s an evolution, it lives, it changes, it’s never twice the same.”

He acknowledged the risks associated with AI on a planetary level. He said there was the danger that it could get “out of control,” and said AI had to be managed on a global scale. He noted that there has to be “a consensus between the East and the West” and “boundaries that need to be set” to ensure that humanity is not in jeopardy.

As far as art goes, though, there were “really positive aspects of the current evolution,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.