(Image credit: Johnny Sheridan)
Can a gallery show AI-generated art without betraying art itself? Belfast Exposed in Northern Ireland just tested that question. But the answer it's produced isn't the clean yes or no anyone wanted.
The facts are straightforward. Beneath the Surface, an exhibition by nine MFA graduates from Ulster University, included a series of AI-generated images by Johnny Sheridan, exploring what he's called the perils of AI. Personally, I found these funny, thought-provoking and cleverly put together.
In the gallery's own words: "His work, Galatea is an AI based photographic work depicting a failed near future romance between a man and his robotic AI girlfriend. Borrowing its title from the Greek myth of Pygmalion, the project explores some of the perils of AI. In particular, it asks whether AI compounds misogyny or if it merely reflects it."
In a BBC interview Deirdre Robb, the gallery's chief executive, defended the artwork, describing it as satirical and controversial. Other photographers and artists though, including Chloe Austin and Brendan Harkin, objected strongly, arguing that AI-generated work has no place on a photography gallery's walls.
The wider online reaction has gone further still: Belfast Exposed has been accused of promoting "AI slop," the decision to show the work has been called "disgusting" and "vile", and campaigners have demanded its removal, a formal apology, and a boycott of the gallery.
The gallery's case
The gallery's position boils down to this. Their job isn't to only show work that's comfortable or uncontroversial; if anything, the opposite. This is exactly the kind of piece that makes people argue in the foyer – which is practically the job description of a gallery like Belfast Exposed.
The artist's main objection is, though, that generative AI is trained on scraped data, without permission or payment. This is not a matter of opinion; it's the entire premise of various lawsuits currently working their way through the courts on both sides of the Atlantic. A notion that a gallery ostensibly dedicated to photography – a medium built on someone actually being somewhere, pointing a camera at something real – perhaps ought to take seriously.
Not every AI show causes this row
What's interesting is that the row hasn't followed AI into every gallery. I'm aware of at least four other recent exhibitions that have used AI just as prominently as Belfast Exposed did, without anything like the same backlash.
Last year, I visited Refik Anadol's Living Architecture: Gehry at the Guggenheim Bilbao; his new show Machine Dreams: Rainforest is appearing at DATALAND, the world's first museum dedicated to AI art. Then there's Serpentine South's processing… Art and Advanced Technologies, an archive show about the field itself; and Haus of Thrills' Taken AI; a browser-based piece that invites the public to overwrite a Van Gogh with AI prompts.
Each has avoided controversy for a different reason. Refik Anadol's AI model was trained on 35 million architectural images his own studio compiled, rather than on scraped internet artwork. Serpentine South's show sidesteps the question by presenting AI as a subject of study rather than a finished artwork. Haus of Thrills' Taken AI never claims to be a finished piece at all: its whole point is that the image is "touched by everyone, improved by no one", erasure as satire.
Sheridan's images, though, share none of those get-outs. They were made with general-purpose generative AI software, trained on scraped, uncredited work, and presented as finished pieces in a gallery context; the exact medium whose practitioners are angriest about that scraping in the first place.
The uncomfortable bit
Belfast Exposed hasn't ducked the row. On 22 July, the gallery issued a statement noting that "the views, themes and artistic approaches expressed are those of the individual artists," and two days later convened a public panel, AI, Art and Society, bringing together Robb, MLAs Kate Nicholl and Sian Mulholland, and Professor Donovan Wylie, director of Ulster University's MFA Photography programme, to discuss the row in the open, rather than hiding behind a press statement.
Ultimately, here's what I keep coming back to. Both sides in the Belfast row are arguing from principle, not bad faith. Yes, galleries should platform difficult, satirical work. But also, artists are rightfully furious that the tools used to make it were built by scraping the internet, without asking anyone's permission.
These aren't contradictory positions so much as two truths sitting at right angles to each other, and I don't think there's a clean synthesis that resolves them.
So no villain, and no tidy conclusion either. Just a gallery that made a defensible, provocative choice, a group of artists with a legitimate grievance, and a small but growing handful of other exhibitions proving that AI in a gallery doesn't have to cause a row at all, if you go about it in a certain way.
