This article contains an interesting timeline of recent AI art applications, from 2015 to 2022:
“The AI art we had before 2021 was intriguing, but tended to be abstract, esoteric, and just not that relatable to a human. The AI art we have now is fully controllable, and can be about whatever you want it to be. What changed? Well, there’s something to be said for the new wave of publicity and interest, which certainly accelerated the pace of our art-generation techniques. But the main development is the rise of multimodal learning.”
Another good read on the same topic is Clip Art and the New Aesthetics of AI by Luba Elliott, which also mentions this amazing work by Memo Atken.