Michel El Gemayel has watched artificial intelligence enter the UAE’s creative scene the way everyone else has — fast, cheap, and impossible to ignore. The portraits, the cloned voices, the images pulled from a single line of text. What holds his attention is not the flood of new work. It is the small share of it that will still mean something in ten years.
El Gemayel is the CEO of the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation, known as ADMAF, which has spent close to three decades behind Emirati and UAE-based artists, musicians and writers. He is not worried about whether artists use AI. That argument, for him, is settled. He is interested in a harder one.
“The pieces that stay with you are never the ones showing off the tool,” he told Khaleej Times. “They are the ones where the technology almost disappears, because the idea is so strong that the technology is simply serving it.”
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The UAE’s creative community is separated on its views regarding the matter. In May, Khaleej Times reported that local musicians and producers were pushing back against AI-generated songs and cloned vocals, warning that the technology was eroding originality and blurring who made what. At Art Dubai this year, digital artists turned the same tools on themselves, using AI to question ownership, memory, and how much of daily life now runs on machines nobody sees.
El Gemayel sits in neither camp. He is not defending AI, and he is not resisting it but tries to make a standard for it.
That standard now has a structure around it. ADMAF has partnered with the Abu Dhabi technology company G42 and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence on an award, with a prize of Dh50,000, that asks UAE-based creatives to make new work with AI and advanced tools. It is open to visual artists, designers, technologists and researchers based in the country, a deliberately wide door rather than a narrow one.
Shortlisted artists join an intensive fellowship at MBZUAI, working next to researchers at one of the strongest AI institutions in the world.
“They are not observing from a distance,” El Gemayel says. “They are in the room, testing ideas, asking questions, and refining their thinking with people who are 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, he says, with a sharper project and a fluency they can use long after the programme ends.
El Gemayel is careful not to prescribe a subject or a style. What he wants is a real idea, expressed through the technology so completely that you cannot separate the two. The strongest submissions, he says, will be the ones where the work could not exist without both the idea and the tool together.
For a UAE audience, part of that idea is memory. He 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 says, “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.
The tools are already here. El Gemayel’s point is that the judgement to use them well is the rarer thing.
He 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 says, “the technology has become another medium in their hands.”
Submissions for the award close on August 14. The winning work is due to be shown at the Abu Dhabi Festival in 2027.
Source: Khaleej Times