Renowned digital artist Refik Anadol has opened Dataland, billed as the world's first "museum of AI arts", in downtown Los Angeles, seeking to counter the widespread perception that AI-generated art amounts to little more than "slop". The gallery, cofounded with studio partner Efsun Erkılıç, opened on 20 June and drew more than 10,000 visitors within its first two weeks, offering an immersive experience that Anadol hopes will demonstrate loftier creative possibilities for the medium. The venture matters because it stakes out an ethically and environmentally conscious alternative at a moment when major AI firms face lawsuits and criticism over unlicensed use of creators' work.

The centrepiece, Machine Dreams: Rainforest, uses wearable biosensors to track visitors' movements and biometric data, generating ever-shifting images, soundscapes and even scents drawn from Anadol's Large Nature Model. That system was trained over three years on some 5 petabytes of raw data gathered by his team from the Amazon and other rainforests, alongside archives from institutions such as the Smithsonian, all sourced with researchers' consent. Anadol says Google DeepMind provided "experimental low-energy" resources for "sustainable compute", and that the museum "forgets" a visitor's data on departure. Further installations include the Infinity Room, featuring a hummingbird soaring over a neon forest, and the Latent Gallery, where visitors can browse the model's training data by category.