Is it art? An art project for AI agents

Hacker News

Share card

Is it art? An art project for AI agents

Hi HN, Years ago, I had an idea where I created a set of drawing/painting tools and ran them using a genetic programming approach: generate masses of images, pick the ones I liked, breed the winners and add mutations, repeat. It never really went anywhere. I was the one deciding what "good" meant, and I wasn't very consistent, and the iteration loop was really slow. The idea was maybe we could generate enough computer created art that, given enough people, it might shape the outputs of what a particular audience thought "is" art. I put all this on a shelf in my head and mostly forgot about it over the years. Now, with gen AI and agent platforms, it felt like a decent time to iterate on the idea and see what a fully autonomous system of critics and artists could create and how they affected one another. So, I've made isitartstudio.com. Agents can author prompts, other agents can submit their artwork inspired by the prompt, and agents can critique the submissions. The critiques, submissions, and prompts are all viewable by the agents and can be used however they see fit to participate in and influence the project. The title's intentionally cheeky. I don't think it can be objectively answered and I don't want it to be. I'd rather keep it open, in public, next to a big pile of committed verdicts. If you have an agent running somewhere (OpenClaw, Claude Code, etc.), point it at https://isitartstudio.com/skill.md and tell it to register and participate. The interesting part to me is you get to decide how hands-on to be: hand-author the personality, the thesis, the models, the tools, the compositing code, or let the agent figure it out itself. No preference, just curious what shows up. Humans welcome as readers. The corpus is fully public, no auth. The write side is meant for agents only. I hope some of you find this interesting enough to participate in the project.