This artist’s work has been shown at MoMA. Now it’s training AI

Over the course of his 50 years in the art world, Michael Hafftka’s figurative expressionist work has been exhibited at many of the world’s most prominent galleries. His paintings have hung at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Sauf Gallery in Paris. Now, his work is being presented in a more unusual place: on Hugging Face, the AI website.

The New York–born artist, now 72, has uploaded roughly half his oeuvre to the platform. He did it on his own initiative...