This art project is like a Rorschach test for AI

Hugues Bruyère shows how human-machine collaboration can produce wondrous things.

I’ve spent the last hour glued to the screen, mesmerized by the art of Hugues Bruyère. I kept looking at his video loops again and again, scrolling down his Threads homepage, hypnotized. I’ve never seen anyone merge physical media and artificial intelligence like this—turning the technology into a true artistic tool that actually makes sense and is pretty. Bruyère has cleverly used AI to create live images from manipulating physical media like magic putty, acrylics, and ink.

In one of his videos, he uses an eyedropper to put black ink into a triptych of small flat plates full of milk. As he drops the liquid, the amorphous dark shapes come alive instantly. The drops in the first plate transform into two rough, classically drawn figures for a split second, only to briefly morph into mountains that then change into a group of people with tunics wandering across a white field, ultimately becoming a dead, shapeless stain. The second plate’s ink droppings quickly go from a woman dancing to a person by a river, some dead trees, a flock of crows, and some mountains that dissolve into another static blob. In the third, the ink makes a human figure in the distance, walking under three stacked clouds in the rain.