2022 was a big one — for everyone in their own way, but in the context of this article, quite obviously because of the AI launch. ChatGPT, Midjourney, AI-generated artworks that started scooping up world-scale prizes: this is when the obsession with AI kicked off, and it hasn't left us since (nor does it look like it is planning to). And while we are talking about AI centring here from time to time, it was never such a simple thing as the selection of the AI artists – rather a glaring gap, and one I am chuffed to be filling now.

Why? First, because it is fun. Second, because it is gorgeous. And finally, because it is the sort of thing you might genuinely be inspired to try yourself. Consider this list equal parts artist roundup and creative inspiration. So, without further ado, let's meet the AI artists making a name for themselves across the Middle East.

Long before generative AI became everyone's creative tool of choice, Hassan Ragab had already carved out a place for himself as one of Egypt's pioneering AI artists. And it shows. For Ragab, AI isn't a magic wand for producing beautiful images, but a medium for asking questions — political ones, social ones (often rooted in Egyptian society) and, occasionally, deeply personal ones.

Take We Are All Kings, for instance — a project exploring how artificial intelligence is beginning to shape our perception of reality. The easiest way to grasp the idea is to try it yourself: ask an AI to generate something "Egyptian". What do you get?

More often than not, it serves up the same familiar ingredients: names like Ahmed and Mohamed, shopfronts called Al-Nile, a handful of famous landmarks, and the usual visual clichés. None of these defines Egypt on its own, yet together they become the country's default visual identity simply because they are repeated so often. Ragab's question is simple: if millions of people — and now AI models — keep reproducing the same image of a place, does that image eventually become the truth?

Another project reveals a far more introspective side of Ragab's practice. In Quatrains of Confusion, the focus shifts from collective identity to personal uncertainty. Inspired by the Rubaiyat by the celebrated Egyptian poet Salah Jahin, the series revolves around questions Ragab found himself asking: What am I doing with my life? What life should I be living? Should I return to a place that once felt like home? Does that place even exist anymore? Like Jahin's poetry, the project offers no neat conclusions. Instead, it suggests that uncertainty is not something to overcome but something to live with — an essential part of being human.

Lucky us — one of the most celebrated AI artists working today happens to be Turkish, making him a perfect fit for this list. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Refik Anadol. What sets his projects apart isn't just that they look stunning (though they certainly do). It is that, unlike what you might assume from the visuals alone, they are backed by an enormous amount of research.

What? Research in AI? How is that even possible?

Well, here is the thing: Refik's story has very little to do with our regular friends, ChatGPT or Midjourney. Anadol works on a genuinely different scale, running a full studio that builds a bespoke machine-learning pipeline for every single project.

Anyone who has seen Anadol's work tends to describe it the same way: as "the dreams of a machine." And, more often than not, they're exactly right — that is what Anadol calls them, too. Why? It all comes down to the idea of latent space: an invisible mathematical landscape where the model explores new combinations of everything it has learned. Rather than recycling existing images, the AI explores this space to generate entirely new ones.

Take Machine Hallucinations, for instance. Widely regarded as one of the landmark works of AI art, the project explores a fascinating question: what would a city look like if a machine could dream it? To answer it, Anadol didn't simply type the question into an AI chatbot. Instead, he and his studio trained a bespoke AI model on hundreds of millions of publicly available photographs of cities — the New York edition alone drew on more than 300 million images. The result is an immersive installation in which cityscapes continuously dissolve into one another across enormous LED walls, creating what feels less like a digital map than the subconscious of a machine.

Samar Younes is a Lebanese artist quietly upending assumptions about what AI art can be. Her work uses artificial intelligence not to generate the familiar or the expected, but to preserve and reshape cultural memory — with a particular focus on South West Asia and North Africa.

Central to her practice is a deliberate refusal of text prompts. Instead, Younes builds her own archives first: researching historical clothing, jewellery, embroidery and material culture through museum records and archival sources. Only once this body of research is assembled does she bring AI into the process, using it to reinterpret and transform what she has gathered.

That process is also a quiet act of resistance. Younes argues that AI systems are far from neutral — they carry embedded bias, lean on stereotypical aesthetics and default to Western-centric visual norms. By supplying the technology with carefully researched cultural references, she deliberately pushes against those limitations, asking AI to imagine histories it would otherwise struggle to see.

Samar Younes describes herself as an ancestral futurist — someone who imagines the future through the lens of the past. Her best-known series, Future Ancestors, brings that idea to life. The project features figures dressed in garments inspired by historical textiles, jewellery and embroidery from the Middle East, North Africa and the Silk Road, but reimagined as though they belong to a distant future. Rather than telling a finished story, the series remains intentionally open-ended. At its heart lies a simple question: what if the future still carried the memory of its ancestors?

Meet Mujahid Jamal (the full interview is linked here) — our next artist and someone who perhaps best illustrates why AI art is far more than simply writing clever prompts.

Jamal didn't arrive at AI through technology. He started out as a photographer, and that background still shapes everything he creates. Rather than replacing the camera, AI became another tool in his creative arsenal, allowing him to build Sard Visuals — a studio dedicated to reimagining contemporary Arab life through a blend of photography and artificial intelligence.

His process is surprisingly traditional (at least, at the beginning). Every project starts with an idea: a feeling, a story or a particular atmosphere he wants to capture. From there, he organises a photoshoot, producing all of the visual material himself. Only then does AI enter the picture. During post-production, it helps extend scenes, transform environments and seamlessly merge multiple photographs into cinematic, dreamlike compositions. Which naturally raises the question: why not skip all those steps and simply generate an image from scratch?

For Jamal, AI is valuable precisely because it removes many of the practical barriers that have long limited visual storytelling. But that is where its role ends. The stories, the emotions and the cultural nuances still have to come from the artist. And when your work is rooted in the everyday realities of the Arab world — where meaning often lies in the smallest cultural details, gestures and shared experiences — that human perspective is what makes the final piece feel authentic.