The Culture Journalist Opinionated software: AI and the arts, revisited
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Hi pals. In 2022, we did an episode with artist, technologist, and friend-of-the-pod Mat Dryhurst to discuss a question that now feels almost quaint: Is AI good or bad for art? This was back in the days (pre-ChatGPT) when everybody was freaking out about text-to-image generators like Dall-E and Midjourney, and we discussed what they might mean for working artists. Obviously, a lot has happened since then, so it felt like time to check back in with Mat.
Mat is the rare artist and leftist we know who’s also an outspoken proponent of AI tools, if not the broader economic structures shaping their creation and deployment. While we don’t agree on everything, we share a core perspective: This tech isn’t going away, and artists and creative people need to understand it if they want to have a say in what the future will look like.
Having worked with AI in his practice for over a decade alongside his partner Holly Herndon — they’ve even co-authored a book about AI and cultural production — Mat brings a deeply informed perspective to the ethical implications and creative possibilities of these tools. Given that conversations about AI tend to fall into polarized culture war-style faceoffs, we wanted to dig into the fine print of what’s actually going on, where the AI industry is heading, and where creative workers should be focusing their attention.
Mat talks with us about what running a start-up focused on giving artists more power over their training data taught him about the limits of current copyright debates, and whether slop is as big as a problem for culture as people are making it out to be. We also get into why blanket bans of AI-generated art and music are not only impractical, but bad for artists. Plus, we discuss why Mat thinks open models are critical to creative control in a landscape that is increasingly consolidated around a handful of powerful companies.
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