In a cavernous warehouse north of New York City, a 16-foot robot outfitted with a cutting tool etched intricate grooves into a faceless marble head atop an alien-like torso.

Water sprayed into the air as an image created with artificial intelligence entered the physical world.

In February, during a three month stint as Open AI’s first artist in residence, Alexander Reben gained early access to the startup’s Sora text-to-video tool, which instantly generates videos up to a minute in length from written or spoken prompts.

Reben, a technologist trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used Nvidia’s neural radiance field technology to turn Sora’s AI-generated imagery into 3-D models. The cutting tool, run by a small company called Monumental Labs, turned one of those into a 4-foot-tall sculpture carved from white Italian marble veined with black and gray.

While many artists view AI as a threat to their livelihoods, Reben, whose residency ended in April, embraces it as a collaborator.

“I got a closer view of how innovation happens within an AI company, and got a better idea of why it’s important to push the edges and try new things,” Reben, 39, said.

Toward the end of the residency, he focused on a prototype system that turned photos of real objects into AI-generated images, poems and even short, satirical blurbs.

His setup consisted of his phone, a Fujifilm Instax photo printer and another printer that spit out receipts and labels. A web browser-based system combined Reben’s code with a version of the large language model that powers ChatGPT.

The “conceptual camera,” whose interface appeared on Reben’s phone screen, had 15 “modes.” One of them, which Reben calls “Silly AI Label Maker,” assigns a name to any item pictured.

When he snapped an image of a yellow zinnia, for example, out popped a label designating the flower a “sunny puffball.” The vase containing the flower got a new name, too: “sunflower sipper.” Sunglasses became “shady peepers.”

To demonstrate his conceptual camera, Reben held his phone above a rudimentary sketch of a face, a lone tear falling from each eye, alongside a shape that passed for a tree.

Almost as quickly as he took the photo, an image sprang from a hand-held printer.

The setup turned the drawing into a bizarre, AI-generated picture that blended the face and the tree into a tearful, ghoulish man with a neck and shoulders that looked like they had been carved from wood.

OpenAI, which is based in San Francisco, says artists like Reben help it understand the potential of its AI tools. His projects “showed our technology in a new light, inspiring our teams to see the creative possibilities of what we’re building,” a spokesperson for the company said in an email. But Hugh Leeman, an art lecturer at universities such as Duke, Colorado State and Johns Hopkins, wonders if the residency is just a marketing move to appease artists who worry their work is being used to train AI systems without permission, payment or credit. Some are concerned that AI could alter the very nature of creativity.

“From a company standpoint, they’re getting out ahead of the curve here,” Leeman said. “This is a mechanism of saying: ‘Look, we’ve always loved artists. In fact, we’ve worked with artists.’ ”

But he is a fan of Reben. Leeman started researching his work after seeing it last year at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, Calif. Leeman was most struck by the cheeky mischief — like the AI-generated snubs of the artist’s show that rotated on a wall display, declaring it, among other insults, a “masterstroke of blandness.”

“It was both criticizing AI and criticizing him for using it,” Leeman said. “I thought, what a beautiful sense of humor and self-awareness on this that is very needed in the art world.”

That humor comes through in Reben’s camera.

One of its modes takes images and gives them an absurd twist: Imagine a battalion of tiny toy soldiers climbing a scone as if it were a hilly battlefield.

Reben took a photo of sunglasses sitting on a table at his home in Berkeley, Calif. (He had set out those and other random objects for his demonstration.) The camera produced eight paragraphs under the headline “Local Sunglasses File Restraining Order Against Unrelenting Sun.”

The overworked glasses, according to the text, are simply asking for more temperate working conditions: “a few clouds” now and then, or an “occasional overcast day.”

“The sun has yet to respond to the allegations,” the passage continues. “Legal experts speculate that the solar defendant might struggle to appear in court given its 93-million-mile commute and busy schedule keeping the solar system in order.”

Reben said that he understood and empathized with the concerns roiling the artist community as AI evolved, but that new technologies always face growing pains.

“There are different types of art,” he said, “and different reasons that art exists.”

(Last December, The New York Times sued OpenAI and its primary partner, Microsoft, claiming they used millions of articles published by the Times to build chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information. Both companies have denied the claims.)