Artificial intelligence visual art, or AI art, is visual artwork generated (or enhanced) through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) programs, most commonly using text-to-image models (T2I or TTI). Automated art has been created since ancient times. The field of artificial intelligence was founded in the 1950s, and artists began to create art with artificial intelligence shortly after the discipline was founded. Throughout its history, AI has raised many philosophical concerns related to the human mind, artificial beings, and also what can be considered art in human–AI collaboration. Since the 20th century, people have used AI to create art, some of which has been exhibited in museums and won awards.

During the AI boom of the 2020s, text-to-image models such as Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Runway, and FLUX.1 became widely available to the public, allowing users to quickly generate imagery with little effort. Commentary about AI art in the 2020s has often focused on issues related to copyright, deception, defamation, and its impact on more traditional artists, including technological unemployment.

Automated art dates back at least to the automata of ancient Greek civilization, when inventors such as Daedalus and Hero of Alexandria were described as designing machines capable of writing text, generating sounds, and playing music. Creative automatons have flourished throughout history, such as Maillardet's automaton, created around 1800 and capable of creating multiple drawings and poems.

Also in the 19th century, Ada Lovelace, wrote that "computing operations" could potentially be used to generate music and poems. In 1950, Alan Turing's paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" focused on whether machines can mimic human behavior convincingly. Shortly after, the academic discipline of artificial intelligence was founded at a research workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956.

Since its founding, AI researchers have explored philosophical questions about the nature of the human mind and the consequences of creating artificial beings with human-like intelligence; these issues have previously been explored by myth, fiction, and philosophy since antiquity.

Since the founding of AI in the 1950s, artists have used artificial intelligence to create artistic works. These works were sometimes referred to as algorithmic art, computer art, digital art, or new media art.

One of the first significant AI art systems is AARON, developed by Harold Cohen beginning in the late 1960s at the University of California at San Diego. AARON uses a symbolic rule-based approach to generate technical images in the era of GOFAI programming, and it was developed by Cohen with the goal of being able to code the act of drawing. AARON was exhibited in 1972 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. From 1973 to 1975, Cohen refined AARON during a residency at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University. In 2024, the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited AI art from throughout Cohen's career, including re-created versions of his early robotic drawing machines.

Karl Sims has exhibited art created with artificial life since the 1980s. He received an M.S. in computer graphics from the MIT Media Lab in 1987 and was artist-in-residence from 1990 to 1996 at the supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence company Thinking Machines. In both 1991 and 1992, Sims won the Golden Nica award at Prix Ars Electronica for his videos using artificial evolution. In 1997, Sims created the interactive artificial evolution installation Galápagos for the NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo. Sims received an Emmy Award in 2019 for outstanding achievement in engineering development.