Arts

A new study by MIT researchers found that it is impossible to draw a direct link between AI diffusion model outputs and an artist’s body of work, writes Gizmodo’s Webb Wright. “If a [diffusion] model generates something, you want to be able to say, ‘Oh, this part of the training data was responsible,'” says Zheng Dai, PhD ’24, lead author on the study. “It’s important for us to understand how these models work to properly study them or regulate them.” 

WBUR’s Maddie Browning highlights exhibits by artists Uri Aran and Hao Jingban set to be displayed at the MIT List Visual Arts Center from Oct. 23 to Feb. 28. Aran’s first major institutional solo exhibition in the U.S “includes new works that feel strange yet recognizable," while Jingban’s “‘I Witness’ (2025) explores the aftermath of the pandemic through four people experiencing different forms of loss,” writes Browning 

Prof. David Gifford and Zheng Dai PhD ’24 discovered that AI diffusion models can replicate the style of an artist even when their work was omitted from datasets, leading to ‘attribution decay,’ writes Fast Company’s Jesus Diaz. “This trend, what the researchers call ‘attribution decay,’ means that artificial intelligence can produce an image that resembles a particular artist’s work, while having no provable causal link to that artist’s actual contribution to the training data,” explains Diaz.  

The Boston Globe’s Mark Feeney chronicles MIT’s adaptive reuse of the historic Metropolitan Warehouse into the new home of the School of Architecture and Planning. “As spaces, our studios used to be a lot more like labs, but now they are grand and full of light and celebratory in a way that hopefully enables better work,” says Prof. Ana Miljački, Head of the Department of Architecture.  

MIT researchers found the more data an AI model is trained on could complicate AI copyright, auditing, and governance, writes Computer World’s Taryn Plumb. “[S]ingle artworks by specific artists, or photographs of certain people, could be entirely removed from datasets, and the model could still reproduce that image or style,” writes Plumb. “Essentially, tangible connections are lost, and linking to specific data points responsible for generated samples is ‘practically impossible,’ or can even vanish, the researchers explained.” 

VICE’s Luis Prada spotlights Prof. Tristan Brown’s discovery that a Chinese tea label on display as a Boston Tea Party artifact at Boston’s Old South Meeting House was actually created during the 19th century. After Brown translated the label from Cantonese, it “revealed an American name, 'Smith, Archer,' as it identified Smith, Archer and Co., a New York trading firm active in East Asia during the 1860s and 1870s,” writes Prada. 

Gizmodo’s Gayoung Lee describes how Prof. Tristan Brown found that a tea chest label, on originally thought to be an artifact of the Boston Tea Party, actually originated from 19th century trade between China and America. “The discovery doesn’t diminish the label; it replaces one story with a richer one,” says Brown. “That broader story, of how revolutionary memory gets made through objects whose own histories stretch across the globe, is what I hope the paper contributes to ongoing conversations about history, material culture, and American identity.” 

Dezeen’s Ellen Eberhardt describes how the renovation of the historic Metropolitan Warehouse, the new home of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, maintains “details such as the building's fortress-like corner towers and crenellated corbeled cornices, while punching new windows into its two-foot-thick walls.” Eberhardt highlights how “the project included careful ‘cutting strategies’ and the application of new support systems to shift existing loads within the building to make room for modern academic spaces such as studios and makerspaces.”  

Prof. Tristan Brown discovered that a tea label previously thought to be salvaged from the Boston Tea Party in 1773 actually dates back to the 19th century, writes Smithsonian Magazine’s Ryley Graham. “The artifact’s true origin came to light when Brown took a closer look at the Chinese text on the label...When read in Cantonese, Brown found that the phonetic characters yielded the words 'Smith, Archer,' a reference to Smith, Archer & Co, an American import-export company that shipped teas from East Asia to the United States in the 19th century, nearly a century after revolutionaries dumped British tea into Boston Harbor.” 

For The Architect’s Newspaper, reporter Fred A. Bernstein details the renovation of the Metropolitan Warehouse, the new home of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, transforming the fortress-like storage warehouse into “light-filled classrooms and studios.” The building is “going to be a living laboratory and a teaching tool for generations of students,” shares Prof. John Ochsendorf. “Twenty years ago, MIT took me inside and asked if I could see a way to reuse the building. And I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ It was hard to imagine it could be as open and light-filled as it is. That took heroics.” 

In a “radical example of adaptive reuse” and a reimagining of a historic Cambridge landmark, MIT has transformed the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse into the new home of the School of Architecture and Planning, bringing together MIT’s architecture and design programs into one connected academic hub, reports Boston Business Journal reporter Maya Shavit. “There will be new installations and new manifestations of our students’ creativity every single week,” explains Prof. John Ochsendorf. “That’s unpredictable and messy, but it’s also part of the fun of being at a place like MIT where people are constantly inventing the future.”

Graduate students Alfonso Parra Rubio and Erik Strand from the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms worked with the Boston Public Library and the Boston Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture to create a chain-like aluminum sculpture, which will be on display at the library until November, writes Axios’ Steph Solis. “It's a feat of science-driven design and art,” notes Solis.  

Smithsonian Magazine’s Sarah Kuta highlights Lecturer Franco Rossi’s work identifying the name of ancient Maya mathematician Sak Tahn Waax, or “White-chested fox,” inscribed in a chamber with murals, hieroglyphs and mathematical texts. One of Waax’s equations, linking the cycles of Mars and Venus to units of time in the Maya calendar, is “meant to concisely and meaningfully show the relationship between these two planets and human counts of time in ways that could then be applied to political ceremony, predictive astronomy and understandings of seasonality,” says Rossi.