Tableau spoke about artificial intelligence with digital artist Marc Downie, an associate professor of practice in the arts in Cinema and Media Studies. Here he shares further thoughts on collaborating with people and machines.

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I have, essentially, never made an artwork by myself. I’ve always had at least one collaborator—sometimes maybe even four or five. We’ve had assistants, but we’ve never really had a hierarchy inside a core group of collaborators. So the process has always been very, very open. I think to be good at collaborating means not really knowing where the ideas are coming from. Working with AI leads you in the same direction, which is that you become very skeptical about self-expression. You become skeptical about intent. You become skeptical about planning and foresight.

You don’t become skeptical about work—there’s a lot of work. In some sense, the harder I work, the luckier I get. But it doesn’t seem like it’s coming from me. I feel like there is something in here that I need to dig out, but it feels like discovery rather than invention. And that’s been constant throughout my career.

You feel fortunate to have been able to work so hard in order to find yourself in the right place to receive this image. As opposed to, “I made this with my talent,” it’s “I found that the world can do this. I found the bit of the universe that contains this.” It’s humbling. You can share credit for discovering something with your collaborators freely because we were all lucky. We all built a situation where this happened. There’s no sense of ownership. I feel very lucky to be there when the pixels shine in just the right way.