No Smoke, No Mirrors: Cutting Through AI Hype in Artistic Practice — KEYNOTE
Eleonora Lima
Lecturer in Cultural AI at King’s College London (UK) & Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)
25 October 2025, 10:00, Sala Cinema UNATC (75-77 Matei Voievod Street)
No Smoke, No Mirrors: Cutting Through AI Hype in Artistic Practice
As AI increasingly permeates creative practice, artists often find themselves positioned as mediators between complex technological systems and public understanding. However, despite stated educational intentions, AI art projects can inadvertently perpetuate public misunderstandings about AI creativity, agency, and consciousness. This becomes particularly concerning when such projects gain visibility in policy discussions and public debates about AI. Using the high-profile case of Ai-Da, the robot artist, as a central case study, I will explore how the concealment of technical processes and human creative input creates misleading impressions of machine autonomy, and how anthropomorphic design choices in AI art projects can systematically shape public perception. The presentation will consider how artists working with AI technologies can leverage them to push the boundaries of human–machine co-creation whilst resisting the allure of AI hype.
Eleonora Lima is Lecturer in Cultural AI at King’s College London and Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin working on the EU-funded project Knowledge Technologies for Democracy (KT4D). She works across Critical AI Studies, digital media, and artistic creativity. Her publications mostly deal with how human culture – encompassing both artistic expression and collective knowledge and values – has been shaped and transformed by digital tools and methods of representation since the advent of the first computers. Between 2019 and 2022, she was a member of the Ethically Aligned Design for the Arts Committee (a part of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems) dedicated to policy research and advocacy for the ethical practice and design of AI in the arts.
Associate Editor – Journal of Open Humanities Data (JOHD)
Research Website: Narrating Computing
The keynote is part of the the second edition of the AI in Art Practices and Research international conference, organized by UNATC in Bucharest from 23–26 October 2025. The event explores the impact of AI on artistic creation and research, as well as its broader applications in society, such as accessibility, healthcare and well-being.