Art meets medicine with the help of advancing AI

Social media and news platforms have been buzzing with hype about the newest incarnation of artificial intelligence (AI) in recent weeks. ChatGPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) is an Open AI chatbot that produces a range of fairly sophisticated and nuanced texts for various applications, including legal and academic. The immediate implication is, of course, the rendering of numerous human activities and brainwork obsolete. As with most such tech experiments however, the most interesting results are those which involve that most human of activities — making art. 

Far from being discouraged by the fact that AI-produced art is already with us, many contemporary artists are beginning to use AI and related tech to aid their practice. Local universities have been quick to formalise courses and research platforms to study and shape the new wave of tech. Launched in 2010, Huma — the Institute for Humanities in Africa at UCT — is one such space. Its interdisciplinary programmes focus partly on how such tech brings changes to societies and cultures that are usually the province of traditional humanities disciplines. 

A recent outcome of this research took the form of a unique and timely project, which was staged in Cape Town as an art exhibition of work-in-progress. AIAIA — Aesthetic Interventions in Artificial Intelligence in Africa, headed by artist-researcher Ralph Borland — shows art-research work from his fellowship on the Future Hospitals project at HUMA.

This intriguing research group is investigating the role of emerging technologies in healthcare in Africa, is hosted by Huma and is funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. It looks particularly at the role of AI as part of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) and the possible future of hospitals in Africa.

By putting the technology into a medical context of care, numerous crucial questions are raised, which are becoming more obvious as AI develops, such as “what are the ethical principles that underpin machine learning, and what are the implications for African countries in particular?” 

The hospital is where a lot of these questions come to life — or death — in an urgent way. The Future Hospitals project also asks how AI will affect our ideas about what it means to be well, disease-free, hospitalised and cared for, and how it will change the work and training of health professionals. 

The centrepiece of Borland’s AIAIA exhibition, hosted at Brutal in Woodstock, Cape Town, is the transformation of a 3D-printed replica of the artist’s femur into a bone flute, which was then played in various contexts over the course of the short exhibition run. The work, simply titled Bone Flute, is a collaboration with orthopaedic surgeon Rudolph Venter, in the Division of Orthopaedic Surgery at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Stellenbosch University, and flute player, composer and improviser Alessandro Gigli. The work was accompanied in situ by a short film on its concept and making by filmmaker Dara Kell.

The concept of turning a 3D-printed bone into first an “artwork” and then a musical instrument reflects one of the most widely used early applications of AI, or machine learning, in 3D printing technology. Venter’s orthopaedic 3D-printing lab is at Tygerberg Hospital and makes replicas of patients’ bones to allow the rehearsal of complex surgeries. The exhibition is noteworthy for its use of the medical technology in the context of art-making, to emphasise the potential the tech has for positive human-machine collaboration, given that it is regarded with suspicion by most.