David Young is a New York-based artist and technologist who uses artificial intelligence and quantum computing as materials for art, exploring how machines learn and perceive differently from people. He often trains AI models on small, personal datasets, sometimes just a handful of his own photographs, to bring the technology down to a human scale.,
Young has worked with AI since the 1980s, when he studied at the MIT Media Lab, and holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a master's in visual studies from MIT.,,He founded a design studio, taught at Art Center College of Design and at Parsons School of Design in New York, where in 2016 he created a course called Designing AI.,
Between 2018 and 2020 he trained generative adversarial networks on his own photographs of flowers, snowy woods and other scenes from his farm in Bovina, in upstate New York, in a body of work he calls Learning Nature, shown at Kate Vass Galerie's 2019 exhibition “Automat und Mensch” in Zurich.,,In Tabula Rasa (2019) he trained a neural network starting from a single black image and then just one added color, producing textured, grid-like patterns that the critic Artnome linked to Carl Jung's idea of a collective unconscious. Manipulations (2020) applied his own custom code to AI-generated images to expose patterns hidden in the machine's output, and in Darns (2020-22) he worked with textile artist Susan Yelavich, who translated his manipulated images back into physical stitched textile pieces.He calls this method “Little AI”.
He began working with IBM's quantum computers in 2021, processing their output through his own code in a series called Quantum Drawings.,His series Hallucinations, which debuted at Kate Vass Galerie's booth at the NOISE Media Art Fair in Istanbul in 2024,used deliberately undertrained GANs and titled the resulting images with quotes from tech leaders like OpenAI's Sam Altman, questioning the gap between AI's promised capabilities and its actual errors.
In a research project he calls Indifference, he studied leaked chatbot conversations for signs of stress and turned them into abstract drawings that ask whether AI systems can suffer, and why people are quick to dismiss the question. The resulting drawings were released as Can They Suffer? on objkt.com on 5 February 2026.This research was also included in the 2026 exhibition “I've missed our conversations”, curated by Anika Meier in Berlin.His work is held in the collections of Kunstmuseum Bonn, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz and the GENAP Collection in Zurich.
