Can AI Make An Artist Better? An Interview With Richard Nadler

"I don't argue about AI. I show what happens when someone uses it with a whole life behind it. That is the only advocacy I trust.”

Richard Nadler doesn’t care if you label him an ‘AI-artist,’ ‘digital-artist,’ or any other hyphenated variation of his profession.

Based in Munich, Germany, Nadler has become popular on social media for making audiences stop scrolling and study his intricate, granular works. Part of creating such rich detail comes from a custom AI model exclusively trained on his own personal references and art.

“What would be impossible without it is the density. A single image in my work can hold thousands of small lives and thousands of separate moments, and no hand could draw that many at once. I set the world, the model fills it, and I decide what survives. That deciding is the whole job, and there is more of it now, not less,” explains Nadler.

“It made me better because it let me stop apologizing for the machine and start using it the way a tailor uses fabric: as a tool for something that was already mine. The work moves along a continuous spectrum between the algorithm and the hand, not as a contradiction. The machine widened what I could attempt. It never once told me what was worth keeping.”

Every project begins “with an initial human phase,” where Nadler defines the structure, tension, and meaning. He then builds custom diffusion models that run for months. “Ten to thirty thousand outputs for a single collection is normal, and some series take a full year and are never released.” When “a chapter is closed,” Nadler makes the work into an embroidery, which is partly an homage to his late father.

“My father was obsessed with fabric. He pressed the finest suit fabric into my hands as a child and told me to feel it, and the embroidery is that same hand, still guiding mine. The specific tools keep changing. What stays is the sequence: memory first, model second, and then the fabric it was always going to become.”

Sanctum Carnis (Embrodiery), 2025

Much of Nadler’s art traces back to his father, who worked in Japan and would often bring his son on trips, taking him to see “the mountains, the shrines, the sakura.” 

“Our last trip was during cherry blossom season, and he died when I was eighteen,” Nadler says, crediting his father’s photography as a source of inspiration. “Those landscapes stayed inside me, and for a long time I had no way to build them at the density they actually have in memory. His whole philosophy was that we don't talk, we show, and I couldn't show this yet. AI was not a shortcut. It was the first tool that could hold that much at once: the mountain he pointed at, the blossom from the last trip, the warmth of it. AI is like a brush or a camera. It belonged the moment it let me carry my father's landscapes into something a person could stand in front of.”

Nadler says a lot of the places his father showed him were places where, “the longer you looked the more the place gave back,” inspiring how he thinks in terms of “mountains and crowds and landscapes, not single objects.”

“AI did not invent that appetite. It removed the ceiling on it. Now a Japanese mountainside or a stadium can hold a whole world, and it rewards the person who leans in a fifth time and finds something they missed. That is the thing I work against: the ten seconds before someone moves on. Every layer of detail is one more reason to stay a second longer.”

That philosophy is perhaps most apparent in Nadler’s sprawling cityscapes and stadium scenes. “A full crowd is the most concentrated form of shared feeling I know,” he says, noting that stadiums are a reference to watching his grandfather play football in Vienna as a child. “So a crowd, for me, is not noise. It is thousands of separate people agreeing to feel one thing at the same moment, which is the warmth of good memories made visible,” says Nadler.

“These are not lonely images. They are the opposite. When I build a crowd, I am trying to turn that agreement to feel together into something you can see and almost stand inside.”

With such rich scenes, it’s difficult to imagine someone dismissing these microscopic details as ‘AI slop.’

“Slop is what happens when no one is deciding. Every detail in my work is a decision, and then it is judged a second time when it becomes thread. Embroidery is unforgiving. If a detail does not survive the fabric, it does not exist. The machine can generate forever. The needle cannot. That is the filter, and it is the opposite of letting a model make every choice for you.”

Would Nadler allow another artist to use his custom model to create their own works?

“No, and not because I am protective.”

“The model is trained on my references: my father's landscapes, the fabric, the sakura I could not unsee. It is not a neutral tool. It is closer to a fingerprint. Handing it over would mean handing over where the work comes from, and that is the one thing that cannot be regenerated,” says Nadler. “What I would give freely is the method. Build your own model from your own life, so it becomes an extension of your memory and your experiences instead of mine. Even throughout my work, the models change. The authorship doesn't. My work carries a specific person inside it, and that person is not transferable.”

Nadler also isn’t afraid of people going to an AI chatbot and typing in ‘Make me a Richard Nadler-style piece.’

“Style is the easy part to copy and the least important part of the work. Anyone can approximate a surface. What no one can type into a box is the reason the work exists: my father, the last trip during the blossom, the fabric he put in my hands,” Nadler says.

“A prompt might give you the look but it will never give you my memories and experiences. Because my work is not something you consume. It is something you disappear into. A style keyword produces the opposite, something you glance at and scroll past. So it would not threaten me. It would only give more validation to my work.”

Will more artists create their own custom models to protect their IP? Nadler agrees it could be a good idea.

“A model trained privately on your own life keeps the source close and the authorship legible. It will not stop anyone from imitating a surface, and that fight has to happen in law and policy too,” he notes. “Custom models protect the thing worth protecting, which is the well the work is drawn from. When you own that well and do not pour it into someone else's system, you stay the author of your own language instead of becoming raw material for a machine that hands it to everyone.”

One of the best-known examples of an artist using AI is Refik Anadol, who recently opened DATALAND: an immersive AI art museum in Los Angeles. When we asked Nadler how he’d explain to a new artist the difference between his work and Anadol’s, Nadler said, “Refik works in light and motion and scale. You step inside the piece and it moves around you in time, and that is a real and generous thing. My work goes the other way. It takes the generated image and holds it still, fixes it in fabric, and asks you to come to it rather than be surrounded by it. His dissolves into light. Mine is meant to last on a wall and reward a slow eye.”

Nadler also admires a few other artists “moving away from prompting and towards building.” Specifically, those who “train their own models on their own materials, so the tool carries a life instead of an aesthetic.”

“Helena Sarin does this very well. She trains on her own drawings and paintings, small and personal, never the average of the internet. Tyler Hobbs is the other direction I watch. He comes out of generative work but keeps pulling it into the physical, into plotters and paint, holding control and chance in the same frame. That last part is why my north star is still Gerhard Richter, and why I trust the younger artists who understand it.”

For upcoming works, Nadler says he’s working on a series of embroidered Japanese landscapes, “the closest I have come to the places my father showed me,” as well as a bronze statue and learning to work with marble.

“The question should never be whether a machine made the work. The question should be what is behind it. What the artist is trying to convey based on their experiences and stories. The uniqueness and beauty of art is the artist’s fingerprint that is left behind. My work exists for that moment of attention. Everything I build, the model, the months, the fabric, the stone, exists to earn ten seconds more of it.”