Walker, artist respond after visitors mistake digital work for ‘AI slop’
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The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis is adding new explanatory language to an exhibition after visitors mistook an artist’s digitally rendered work for generative AI.
Joe Dobrow recently took his two children to the Walker. They wandered from exhibition to exhibition, eventually settling in front of a screen in a dark hallway.
The screen was looping the 2026 video “Field Recordings” by artist Olalekan Jeyifous. It is the first solo museum exhibition for the New York-based artist who is known for his immersive speculative world-building artworks. The video features realistically animated people in leafy riverine settings, sometimes in groups, sometimes with deer, sometimes tinkering with what seem like remnants of analog technology.
“My kids were fairly intrigued with it,” Dobrow said, but “it seemed to me to be almost entirely AI slop.”
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Dobrow is a software developer based in north Minneapolis and says he sees a lot of AI content in his work.
“It looked very much like someone directly, just from a prompt, created different clips and then just stitched them together,” Dobrow said. AI art is “so cheap and kind of doesn't feel like it has any value, so to see it at an art museum…”
Walker curators said that generative AI was not used to create works in “Olalekan Jeyifous: Hydricosmic Litanies,” which opened Aug. 6, but acknowledged that the exhibition offered little information about the digital process behind them. The museum says it’s also developing a policy governing the display and disclosure of AI-generated or AI-assisted art.
Jeyifous told MPR News that he’s not surprised that museum-goers may have confused his work for AI.
“For more than two decades, people have asked some version of, ‘How did you make this?’” Jeyifous said, pointing to his training in architecture and the digital tools of the field. “Those methods are commonplace within the discipline I emerge from, but less familiar to a general museum audience, so there has always been some uncertainty around how my images and objects are produced and that has followed me from the beginning.”
A Reddit post made on Aug. 15 in the Minneapolis subreddit, titled “AI slop alert,” claimed that the exhibition was “almost all AI content and there’s no disclosure letting guests know this.” The post racked up more than 220 comments, including one from Dobrow, who shared his disappointment. Another commenter wrote, “Art museums should be a haven from AI.”
Jeyifous says that the content of his work also may lead to confusion.
“A lot of early AI imagery skewed heavily toward science fiction and its subgenres: cyberpunk, steampunk, and any sort of speculative world-building. That overlaps visually with the sci-fi territory I’ve occupied for more than 20 years,” he said. “As AI imagery increasingly entered the broader visual culture, I anticipated that people might begin viewing my work through that lens, and even retroactively framing my earlier work as ‘AI slop,’ which has actually happened.”
As the Walker exhibition copy states, Jeyifous created a speculative river world inspired by the locale, “neither utopian nor dystopian, the enclave emerges from the histories of the Mississippi River yet exists outside of fixed time.”
In addition to videos, Jeyifous created this water world through dozens of 3D-printed black resin sculptures, CNC-milled wood panels and digital illustrations and technical illustrations printed on watercolor paper, aluminum and vinyl.
Jeyifous says he uses AI-assisted software selectively, be that Photoshop or 3D modeling. Architectural renderers often use computer-aided design programs and digital 3D visualization and modeling software to conceptualize buildings and built environments and how people move through them.
“The central principle for me, both in my practice and teaching experience, is authorship: exploring these possibilities inventively without allowing their seductive capabilities to determine the visual language, narrative or conceptual intent,” Jeyifous said. “Simply prompting images and presenting the results as my artwork is fundamentally at odds with how I’ve always worked.”
Standing in the Jeyifous exhibition, Walker curators Taylor Jasper and Henriette Huldisch said that the artist does not use AI that creates new content wholesale – audio, images, video, text – from simple prompts.
“He works extremely iteratively,” said Jasper, comparing his practice to collage. “Everything goes through multiple stages of reconceptualization, of rendering, of visualization and revisualizing and visualizing again.”
“There's a fundamental misunderstanding of what his medium actually is, and so the question of how these works were made arises often,” Jasper said. “He's academically trained as an architect, and he uses the tools of his field – which are mapping, visualization, spatial logic, rendering – to think through architecture and its impacts, and to imagine these kinds of speculative worlds and environments.”
Huldisch points out that while the artworks are not AI-generated, that does not mean there is no AI used in the process.
“It's never our intent to be misleading or secretive about an artist's process,” Huldisch said. “He uses a range of sophisticated software and tools, many of which have AI embedded within them.”
“There's art historical precedent for there being skepticism around new technologies and emerging technologies as they enter into our field,” Jasper added.
Many saw the invention of photography, for example, as a death knell to painting, but artists still paint, like Suzanne Jackson, who has her first major museum retrospective in an adjacent Walker gallery.
Artists have always used cutting-edge technology, Huldisch said, and while Jeyifous did not use generative AI for this exhibition, the museum is not opposed to working with artists who do use it.
“We will support artists working across all mediums, technologies, and follow whatever work is timely and resonant,” Huldisch said.
The exhibition’s sparse labeling may have contributed to the confusion. Visitors encounter a short introductory text about Jeyifous and the speculative world he created, but little explanation of Jeyifous’ process, digital or otherwise.
“We've obviously since then learned very quickly that people immediately jump to the assumption that generative AI must have been used in the making of the work, and people have really strong feelings about this,” Huldisch said. “So, we're listening and we're learning with our visitors, and we are adding language.”
The Walker, along with the rest of the museum world, is grappling with how to develop policy about the display and disclosure of AI-generated or AI-assisted art. “We are in the process of developing one,” she said.
Jasper and Huldisch said the new explanatory language for the exhibition will be installed this week.
“I recognize that AI usage raises very real ethical questions, and I understand why people want transparency around it,” Jeyifous said. “The difficulty right now is that we don’t have much nuance in the language to describe it. Saying that AI was utilized somewhere in a process can very quickly become perceived as ‘this artwork was entirely AI-generated,’ even when those are fundamentally different things. Disclosure can provide useful context, but it can also unintentionally become the lens through which the entire work is understood, regardless of how marginal that tool was to its production.”
