PromptoScape: where AI becomes the Artist

At first glance, PromptoScape looks like a typical contemporary art exhibition — darkened rooms, glowing screens, and curious visitors leaning in. But look closer, and you’ll realise the artists here aren’t quite what you expect.

Opened on 26 July at the Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, PromptoScape: International Artificial Intelligence Art Documentation Exhibition brings together 31 works by more than 20 artists and collectives from ten countries and regions. The difference? Many of the artists are not people at all, but machines.

Curated by Yao Dajun and Ma Nan, the exhibition is a bold exploration of what creativity means in the age of artificial intelligence. In this space, AI is no longer just a tool — it’s a collaborator, a storyteller, even a creator in its own right.

The name PromptoScape hints at the heart of the show. It’s part "landscape" — a new digital world shaped by machine imagination. It’s part "escape" — a move away from traditional thinking. And it’s part "prompt" — the simple human input that sparks these complex, often beautiful outcomes.

Each work in the exhibition starts with a text prompt: a few words or phrases fed into an AI model, which then transforms it into an image, a video, or something in between. What results is often surprising — both in form and in meaning.

The rooms of Promptoscape form a kind of digital garden — a space that’s constantly shifting, reacting, and generating. It invites the viewer to consider what it means to be an artist. If the machine produces the image, but the human writes the prompt — who made the art?

Some pieces examine memory. Others explore empathy — asking whether a machine can ever truly feel, or only simulate feeling. Many challenge the idea of authorship altogether.

The show is quietly radical. It doesn’t shout. It simply asks: what happens when machines start making meaning?

PromptoScape places Shanghai firmly within the global conversation about technology and creativity. As AI continues to shape how we live, work and express ourselves, exhibitions like this help us pause and reflect.

Not everyone will walk away convinced that machines can make art. But that’s not really the point. PromptoScape doesn’t try to settle the debate — it simply makes space for it.

And as you leave the final gallery, one question lingers: Who is really creating?

That, of course, is up to you.