This article is part of our latest Artificial Intelligence special report, which focuses on how the technology continues to evolve and affect our lives.

Adjusting to technological developments is not a new concept for the art world.

Wood panels were once the standard for paintings, but by the 17th century they were largely overtaken by canvas, and the paint itself changed, too. Video art, a mainstay now, was a new phenomenon in the 1960s.

More recently, augmented reality and virtual reality have captured the imagination of artists as ways to tell stories that we could not have imagined even 20 years ago.

But the rise of artificial intelligence in art, a phenomenon in recent years, has a different cast to it. Not only is A.I. a tool for artists, who are employing machine intelligence in fascinating ways, it is also frequently a topic to be examined — sometimes in the same piece.