By Miller Rogers-Tetrick

Artificial intelligence may transform the way people live, but for artists, it’s reshaping imagination and creativity. Across the University of Maryland’s art department, creative minds explore what happens when AI becomes a collaborator rather than just a tool. 

ARTU’s Future Frames 2025 exhibition invited artists, designers and creative thinkers to submit posters and short videos that examined the role of AI in design, communication and culture. The exhibition highlights conceptual clarity, voices, and originality. 

In collaboration with ARTU, Eric Millikin, an artist and activist, visited this university on Monday to discuss the evolving relationship between AI and art as a part of the Future Frames exhibition. 

Millikin said the partnership between art and technology has always existed, and AI is just the latest chapter.

 “The printing press couldn’t kill painting. The camera couldn’t kill painting,” Millikin said. “If AI was able to kill painting, we’d be living in the most amazing time in history.”

Millikin added that art has never been separate from technology.

“But if we go back, let’s make it thinking, like, early art history. We actually label it in very technological terms.” Millikin said.

From the Stone Age to the iPhone, every era’s art reflects the tools of its time. Every technological shift that seems to threaten creativity ultimately marks a new era in art, Millikin said.

 “As artists, we get to pick and choose what we want to do, whether we want to use something new, whether we want to use something old,” Millikin said. 

For Alireza Vaziri, assistant professor of graphic design at UMD, AI access expands creativity. He discussed the ability to create film from personal experiences using AI without a background in filmmaking. 

“This is the future, this is creativity, I think it will give us much more opportunities,” Vaziri said. 

Alongside the exhibition and guest appearances, faculty members encouraged students to think critically about how AI and creativity coexist and to reflect on the roles it plays in their learning.

That sense of freedom through experimentation echoed throughout the event. 

Millikin’s own work combines artificial intelligence, robotics, and literature. His latest exhibition merges Edgar Allan Poe’s haunting language with the movement of algae and light. 

AI-infused systems have the potential to “enhance human capacity and creativity, mitigate complex societal challenges and foster innovation,” Hal Daumé III, director of the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland, said. 

This requires a joint effort between those pushing the boundaries of new AI technologies, however.

While AI is here to stay, its role as a creative tool remains imperfect, according to Jason Gottlieb, a designer and educator at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

AI is still limited and sometimes incompetent, a reminder that it may not be as significant a threat as perceived, Gottlieb said.

As the Future Frames exhibition unfolds this October, it invites visitors into the ongoing conversation between humans and machines, asking questions about what art will soon become. The exhibition will remain in the Parren J. Mitchell Art-Sociology Building until October 31.

Featured Image: Posters from the Future Frames Exhibition. Photo by Miller Rogers-Tetrick