Alexander Reben

Alexander Reben (born 1985) is an American artist and roboticist who studied applied mathematics before earning a master’s at the MIT Media Lab, where he built Boxie — a disarming cardboard interview robot that helped inspire Baymax in Big Hero 6. His career since has been a running experiment in what he calls humanity’s co-evolution with technology: social robots that film documentaries, machines that tell jokes, and sculptures dreamed up by language models.

OpenAI’s first artist in residence

Reben had tested GPT-3 years before its public release, and in January 2024 OpenAI named him its first artist in residence. During the three-month post he used GPT-4, DALL-E, and Sora to conceive works that were then fabricated in the physical world — including AI-invented sculptures carved in stone by robotic arms, and his Plungers series, which he described as flipping authorship on its head while still requiring him to sift thousands of outputs to find the one worth making.

He is candid that critics of AI art have real grievances — people take a negative view for many different reasons, he told MIT Technology Review, and they are all valid concerns — but rejects the idea that machine speed cheapens the result, pointing to the curatorial judgment involved in finding meaning among a model’s endless outputs. His work sits in the MIT Museum’s permanent collection, and he serves as director of technology and research at Stochastic Labs in Berkeley.