The rise of ChatGPT and visual AI platforms like Midjourney and DALL-E have some artists crying foul when it comes to fair use. But art institutions transformed by the digital revolution see AI as the logical next step. Rick Dakan was teaching a comic book class last year with illustration faculty—including a professor who helped draw the famed comic Garfield—when a colleague arrived late because they had been looking at Midjourney, the generative AI platform that creates art with a simple prompt. “I remember cornering the fine arts chair, saying, ‘Have you seen this?’” said Dakan, now chair of the AI Task Force at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Fla. “There was this existential dread about it.”