Wednesday, February 25, 2026
by Ileana Garnand
With a long history of using electronic artistic processes, David Stout uses AI as just another creative tool.

Artificial intelligence is the latest technology David Stout has incorporated into his art, drawn to “a huge field of possibility and play.”

The artist and professor is the keynote speaker at UNT’s 2026 AI in Action event, which brings educators, researchers and practitioners together to explore how AI is reshaping learning, scholarship and work. Held Friday, April 10, attendees should register here by April 1.

A black-and-white art piece by David Stout, with horizontal black lines at the top of the canvas and thick, vertical black lines at the bottom.
'Chatterlings' by David Stout.

Stout inhabits multiple creative roles: he’s a composer and sound artist who works primarily in electronics, a visual artist working mostly with digital mediums, a filmmaker and a performance director.

“I’m very interested in how the arts blend and making work that is a hybrid,” he said. “It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but it becomes something new in the process.”

Stout is a professor of composition studies in the College of Music and an affiliated faculty member for studio art in the College of Visual Arts and Design. His Intermedia Performance Art class is open to students from across the arts, humanities and sciences.

As the coordinator of UNT’s Initiative for Advanced Research in Technology and the Arts, Stout has decades of experience with electronic artistic processes.

In the early 2000s, he formed the audio-visual performance duo NoiseFold, which took data from generative and algorithmic animation and turned it into sound textures and music.

Stout started working with artificial intelligence tools for his art about four years ago. Using machine learning is “an extension of a long arc” of Stout’s work in synthetic media.

 He’s aware of how broad the term AI is — while Stout uses it to discuss “the poetic use of generative imagery,” he said it can also bring to mind “some very dark stuff.”

An abstract art piece with black, green and yellow.
'Cosmogram 1-322' by David Stout.

“When I talk about how amazing it is to work with AI as an art medium, I’m not wanting to discount a lot of the scary or negative aspects to this,” Stout said. “Any technology that has transformed culture in the past has been a double-edged sword.”

To Stout, AI is another creative tool or an artistic medium within itself. In his musical projects, he trains large models on every genre of music to create unlikely fusions. With visual art, he focuses on modeling materials like tar, hair, paint, plastics, fabric and mud to see “what the system can produce that looks sensually tangible. The results are kind of amazing.”

Stout’s approach to using AI tools for his art is collaboration, not outsourcing. His decades of training and practice are necessary to interact meaningfully with AI, just like when he engages in “the art of prompting” people as a director.

“The more knowledge you have, the more detailed your prompts are and the farther you can push the system,” Stout said. “Nothing about this medium suggests to me that we should be uneducated.”

Stout uses this intentional and informed approach in his teaching as well. His graduate students use AI as part of their creative tool sets instead of the sole source of their work.

“In the context of my assignments, there aren’t really shortcuts to just submit a drawing you didn’t do yourself,” Stout said.

Trees are covered in white tendrils on a white and gold ground.
'Walking the Dragon Path I-3' by David Stout.

Instead, he pushes his students to synthesize ideas and work as collaborators with machines to “go beyond our limited individual capabilities.”

“We owe it to ourselves to become as educated as possible,” Stout said. “That means doing all the basic stuff you do in any discipline, with the addition of AI to assist us.”