William Latham gives AI a turn at choosing which forms survive

William Latham called himself a gardener because he selected which digital forms would survive. In a May 2024 interview with Rachel Falconer for Right Click Save, he described selecting and culling computer-generated forms. The machine supplied mutations beyond what he could imagine; he kept refining the ones that met his aesthetic. A promising variation could give him an idea, then require much more work before it became the result he wanted.[1]

That relationship grew from laborious drawings. At the Royal College of Art in the 1980s, Latham applied operations to primitive shapes and drew successive generations by hand. Later, a BBC microcomputer selected operations whose effects he still had to imagine and draw. Moving to IBM brought a vastly larger supply of forms, with programmer and mathematician Stephen Todd becoming a lasting collaborator.[1]

Choosing what breeds next

A June 2026 preprint by Latham, Todd, Dylan Banarse and Frederic Fol Leymarie describes another division of work. In Evolution & Foundation, Gemini judges images produced by the Organic evolutionary system. The artist chooses the initial form, parameters and target; the model repeatedly selects promising parents.[2]

Sixteen forms enter each generation. Gemini compares them in pairs, choosing eight winners. Each winner produces a mutated offspring; parents and offspring together replenish the sixteen. The experiments run for 200 generations. Gemini judges static rendered views of the 3D forms. The team used pairs after larger image groups produced a bias towards earlier positions.[2]

The search can still settle into familiar shapes. The authors describe spirals that became increasingly organised without developing the desired legs or heads. The artist’s choice of starting form and target shapes that search; judging the finished work remains part of the job.[2]

Report an error or suggest a correction