The Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation (ADMAF), technology company G42, and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) have opened a Dh50,000 award for UAE-based creatives to produce new work using artificial intelligence. Submissions close August 14, and the winning piece will be shown at the Abu Dhabi Festival in 2027. The prize is not just a cash award - shortlisted artists join an intensive fellowship inside MBZUAI, gaining direct access to researchers and tools at one of the world's strongest AI institutions.
A harder question than whether to use AI
ADMAF CEO Michel El Gemayel has watched AI enter the UAE's creative scene at speed. He says the debate over whether artists should use the technology is already settled. What interests him is the quality of the work that will last.
"The pieces that stay with you are never the ones showing off the tool," he said. "They are the ones where the technology almost disappears, because the idea is so strong that the technology is simply serving it."
That standard now has a structure. The award deliberately opens a wide door, inviting visual artists, designers, technologists and researchers based in the country to submit proposals. The field reflects a growing intersection of creative practice and AI, an area covered in AI for Creatives Courses. El Gemayel is not prescribing a subject or a style. He wants a real idea expressed through the technology so completely that the two cannot be separated.
A fellowship, not a workshop
Shortlisted artists do not observe from a distance. They work in the room at MBZUAI, testing ideas and refining their thinking alongside researchers pushing the boundaries of the field. The week covers the tools themselves and the ethics that trail them. Artists arrive with a proposal and leave, El Gemayel says, with a sharper project and a fluency they can use long after the programme ends.
The strongest submissions, he believes, will be those where the work could not exist without both the idea and the tool together. That approach aligns with the principles behind Generative Art Training, where the medium and the message are inseparable.
Memory and identity in the machine
For a UAE audience, part of that idea is memory. El Gemayel is drawn to work that puts the country's culture in conversation with new tools. "Work that holds the past and the present in the same frame," he said, "and presents it in new and beautiful ways to new audiences."
That instinct runs alongside a wider national effort to keep Emirati identity inside the technology, from Arabic language AI models to public debate about heritage in an age of automation. The country has the base for it. Stanford University's AI Index 2026 placed the UAE second in the world for AI adoption, at 54 per cent, behind only Singapore, and found AI skills growing faster here than almost anywhere else.
El Gemayel says the sensibility he is describing is already showing up across the artists ADMAF is researching for exhibitions in the coming years. The pattern is restraint. They reach for AI when it serves the idea, not when it is simply available. "When an artist reaches that point," he said, "the technology has become another medium in their hands."
Why this matters for creatives
This award is a signal that the institutions backing UAE culture are not asking whether AI belongs in art. They are asking how to use it with enough judgement that the work still means something a decade from now. For creatives, the fellowship at MBZUAI offers a rare chance to build technical fluency directly alongside researchers, not through a generic workshop. The August 14 deadline means artists and designers have weeks, not months, to shape an idea where the tool serves the concept rather than the other way around.
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