The AI-Assisted Award
Look, we totally understand: an AI award alongside a prize called Rehumanism sounds like a contradiction. AI is coming regardless. One upside is that it lets more people reach ideas worth painting. An AI category gives them a place to take part without feeling they're somehow different or inferior. What matters is the purpose of the story, and the human mind and hand that tell it.
For a painting, drawing or pastel you made by hand from an image you generated with AI. Completely independent of the main competition: its own pool and its own selection. About 20 to 30 works will be selected. Dates to be announced. Free to enter.
For the work where the hand does the most with what AI started.
You keep your work and your copyright.
The challenge
There are two talents in painting: coming up with the idea, and executing it. Much like using a photo reference, an AI reference lets you attempt more challenging ideas. Even when the AI image is rough, deciding what to paint from it is a real creative challenge, and sometimes the creative choice is in the rendering itself.
“I’ve painted hundreds of paintings from life, and a few from imagination. I’m open about my use of AI to challenge myself and tell stories.” — Andrew Conru
A case study
While painting alongside the Seattle Prize fellows, I wanted an idea about the desire, especially among young people, to re-examine classical beauty. Since mythology and religion are less known today, I took inspiration from a meme and used AI to reinterpret it. Your job with AI is to interpret it, to reinterpret it.
Other paintings
Purpose first · 2025
Your job with the AI is to interpret, to reinterpret. These are mine, in my own style; yours will be different, and your goal is to connect more.
About internet and porn addiction: the screen calls, and something monstrous pulls a young man back every time he tries to leave.
I animated it with Veo to understand the concept and find what I wanted. The animation became a way to generate ideas, with lines like “Don’t look away, come back to me” and “You belong here with me now.”
How silly it looks to be engrossed in social media. Put the phones in an old, period dining room and the brain finally notices.
Two lovers holding the world off for a moment, moved to an exotic jungle. It took some twenty to thirty prompts to get there.
A dangerous woman: a mashup of the femme fatale, the innocent in white and a gun aimed straight at us.
Explore more challenging ideas about humanism, and use AI to reach the concept faster and better, especially when your idea is more ambitious than your ability to draw it.
