Mario Forcherio – Image courtesy of the artist. All rights reserved
Mario Forcherio, photographer and digital artist from Italy, on using artificial intelligence as a creative extension — and why the human choice must always be the last one.
Mario Forcherio is a photographer and digital artist based in Italy, with a background in architecture and over fifteen years of professional experience spanning portraiture, events, architecture, and landscape. For the past few years, he has been integrating artificial intelligence into his creative process — not as a shortcut, but as a new dimension of his visual language. We spoke with him as part of the ARTIFACT survey, a Creative Europe project exploring the relationship between artists and AI.
How did AI enter your creative practice — and what does it actually change?
For Mario Forcherio, the arrival of generative AI in his work was not a rupture but an evolution. A trained architect-turned-photographer with more than fifteen years of professional practice, he began using tools like Midjourney a few years ago. The result? Entire series of digital art — surreal landscapes, ironic city visions, floral portraits, pop figures — where writing a prompt becomes a form of composition, and choosing between variations becomes an act of curatorship.
“AI has given me more speed and more room to explore,” he says, “but it has not changed the criterion by which I choose: it works if it moves me, if it surprises me, if it tells something true about the world or about the person looking at it.”
“AI has not changed what I want to say with my images. It has changed how quickly I can say it, and how many roads I can explore before choosing.”
Is AI a tool in your hands, or something more central to the work itself?
For Forcherio, the honest answer is both. AI is sometimes the means — the engine behind a visual idea — and sometimes the medium itself, inseparable from the final form of the work. What never changes, he insists, is the locus of intention. “The vision, the aesthetic choice, the narrative must remain human,” he says. The machine can generate; only the artist can mean.
This distinction matters to him deeply, and it shows in how he describes his photographic and digital practice together: in both, he searches for what he calls a “contemplative dimension” — the image not as product but as a moment of presence and awareness.
What are the biggest barriers you face when working with AI?
The answer is direct: cost. Subscriptions, cloud services, premium tiers — the financial weight of staying current with generative tools is real and recurring. But beyond economics, Forcherio identifies a more structural problem: the lack of genuine networking between artists, researchers, and AI experts. He would value access to communities where creative and technical knowledge actually meet.
What should a fair relationship between artists and AI look like?
Here, Forcherio’s thinking is structured and clear. He lays out three pillars:
Transparency. Every AI-generated work should declare it openly — the same way a digital print or a retouched photograph is labelled. There should be no ambiguity about the process behind the image.
Compensation. AI models were trained on the work of real artists. A system of royalties or licences that remunerates those who involuntarily contributed to building these models is not a luxury — it is a matter of basic fairness.
Creative control. AI must remain a tool or a medium in the hands of the artist, not a substitute. The machine should serve the vision, not replace it.
“A fair relationship between artists and AI must rest on three pillars: transparency, compensation, and creative control.”
What role should artists play in shaping AI regulation?
This is where Forcherio becomes most sharply himself. “AI knows how to imitate everything,” he says, “except the why.” And that — the sense, the intention, the human reason behind a creative act — is precisely what artists should bring to the regulatory table.
For him, the call is not simply for artists to be consulted, but for them to be present in the rooms where the rules are written. Not as witnesses, but as voices that carry something the technologists and policymakers do not: the lived experience of making meaning.
“AI knows how to imitate everything except the why. Artists should bring exactly that to the policy table: the meaning.”
What do you hope to explore in workshops and training?
Forcherio’s wish list for future learning is telling. He wants to go deeper into copyright and rights in the AI era; to explore prompt design as an artistic language in its own right; to understand how to communicate and sell generative art; to examine the environmental sustainability of AI models. And above all — his words — “how to remain artists, not operators, in a world of creative machines.”
That phrase carries the weight of everything. The risk is not only economic or legal. It is existential, in the artistic sense: the risk of becoming a technician of one’s own vision rather than its author.
What is the future of art in the age of AI, in your view?
Forcherio does not believe the future belongs to the most powerful machines. He believes it belongs to artists who know how to use them with intention and critical awareness. Speed and possibility are gifts — but only if the artist holds the criterion.
“Every image, generated or photographed, must have something to say.” That is his standard, and it has not changed. AI has expanded his palette and compressed his timeline. The eye that looks, selects, and decides to keep — that remains his.