Road Work Ahead
We stand on the brink of disruption that will change the world in ways we could never imagine. Artificial Intelligence, Data Privacy, Cybersecurity, and the Future of Work have converged to create a perfect storm of fear and hope.
How do we respond as business owners, workers, and humans? This podcast explores the many answers to that question. This is not a forum for wild speculation or doom-and-gloom, end-of-the-world posturing. Instead, we are navigating disruption the same way we navigate a freeway under construction: When you see the bright orange sign that shouts "ROAD WORK AHEAD" you slow down, pay attention, and look out for the drivers around you.
Join me as I seek out and interview the people who are embracing disruption and committing themselves and their organizations to a brighter future.
Road Work Ahead
#12 - Matt Saunders: Is Artificial Intelligence Creative?
Can a machine harbor the soul of an artist? This question leads our latest discussion with Harvard professor and acclaimed artist Matt Saunders.
It's not a simple question to answer. Creativity is a complex concept and we have to dig into the many ways that word could be defined. Who better to ask about creativity than someone who is both an accomplished artist himself and an instructor at one of the most distinguished art schools in the country?
Matt is a Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. His art has been featured in exhibitions around the world, and the list of museums with his work in their collections includes the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many other names that you would likely recognize.
Matt's art is grounded in the material - particularly painting, but in most of his work you can see how he challenges himself to push back against the idea of a static rectangle of paint-on-canvas and create something more dynamic and transient - something more like an experience than an image.
That same resistance to conventionality comes out in our conversation about AI, and it leads us to some brutally honest conclusions about how we view the techno-obsessed world around us.
Matt is a very thoughtful and inspiring person, and this interview is easily one of the more impactful conversations I've had in a long time.
I share your anxiety, but not maybe your pessimism.
Sam Gerdt:That's a pretty common response. Welcome everybody to Road Work Ahead, a podcast that explores the unmapped future of business and technology. My name is Sam Gerdt and today's interview is oh so very good. Is AI creative? It's not a simple question to answer.
Sam Gerdt:Creativity is a complex concept and we have to dig into the many ways that word could be defined. Who better to ask about creativity than someone who's both an accomplished artist himself and an instructor at one of the most distinguished art schools in the country? Matt Saunders is a professor of art, film and visual studies at Harvard University. His art has been featured in exhibitions around the world, and the list of museums with his work in their collections includes the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art and many other names that you would likely recognize.
Sam Gerdt:Matt's art is grounded in the material, particularly painting, but in most of his work you can see how he challenges himself to push back against the idea of a static rectangle of paint on canvas and create something more dynamic and transient, something more like an experience than an image. That same resistance to conventionality comes out in our conversation about AI, and it leads us to some brutally honest conclusions about how we view the techno obsessed world around us. Matt is a very thoughtful and inspiring person, and this interview is easily one of the more impactful conversations I've had in a long time. Matt, thank you for joining me. I really only have one question and I'm sure we'll get into it after that, but my question is artificial intelligence is it creative?
Matt Saunders:Well, I don't even know how to answer that question until I think I need to understand what you mean by creative. I would say yes, but I feel like maybe you have this availance on creativity that is very perhaps ennobled in the way that people think about it in relationship to art, which is maybe not how I'm answering. Yes.
Sam Gerdt:That's probably true. Let's go back to the beginning and let's ask a more basic question what is your definition of creativity?
Matt Saunders:To be honest, it's not a word I think about or use very much, but I think that I would define it as putting things together in ways that make leaps, whether that's a leap out of a rational path, or whether it's a leap out of a series of expectations, whether it's an inversion of the status quo. The difference between an act and a creative act for me might be one that just hops over some kind of fence.
Sam Gerdt:Yeah, you said you don't use the word creativity or you don't think about it a whole lot as an artist. Is there a reason for that, or is there another idea that comes into play far more often than the idea of creativity?
Matt Saunders:I think I'm a little allergic to the kind of mythologies that we build around artists as a different type of creature, a different type of activity. I feel like there's a continuity between making breakfast and making what turns out to be a milestone painting in someone's life. There's an activity of focus, of thinking, of reacting to past experience, of working with materials. That is part of creating. Sometimes I think those creations are surprising. Sometimes that's surprise linger. Sometimes it's just something that surprises you at first and you get over. Often things come back to stay with you or to challenge you or to make you think differently in the future.
Matt Saunders:In my experience and maybe this is just the type of artist I am I don't have a great amount of faith or predictive capacity in the act of making. I don't always know when I'm being creative. I feel very strongly that there's a difference between the act of making something, the sort of generative act of putting things together, and then the moment of interpreting it or seeing it or understanding it, which is always based in time and place and changes over your life. When I say that I think AI is creative, yeah, it makes things, it's creative, it's creating things. Now, whether that is a virtue, whether creativity with a capital C is some special category that gives you special status. I don't know that. I even would give that as a blanket to myself or to other people. I think it's something that you're touched by from time to time.
Sam Gerdt:When I ask the question, you're an artist, you're an accomplished artist. Why are you an artist?
Matt Saunders:I like things, I like making things, I like thinking about images. I'm a visual person and not so much of a musical person or even a word-based person. For me, it's a way to work with my hands and my mind in a different way than I'm called upon to do in other types of professions. I think I get great pleasure out of that time thinking in other ways. I just love art. There's always, I think, something I feel kinship with, with my imagination of the sentience of an AI who's been trained on data sets, is there's always an aspect of emulation. There's an aspect of being inspired by things that you've seen other people do, things you've seen in the museum, and that itchy impulse you get to rush back to the studio afterwards. I was reflecting on that when I was trying to think about AI before this conversation, that I guess I do have my own data sets. I've been trained to.
Sam Gerdt:I think for me, this is a question that I've been wrestling with for a long time. That is, what about the fact that we are essentially computers with our own data sets? Why am I so quick to say that I can be creative, but that an AI can't? And I think what it comes down to is capacities, and whether or not an AI can ever have the capacity that a human can for synthesis, and I came across a quote by a Dr Blumenthal who, I think, sums it up very well. He says there are no psychological qualities. In physics, for example, there is no red, no green or blue. In the physical world, redness, greenness and blueness are a phenomena that are created by the cortex of the experiencing individual. A musical quality, the flavor of the wine or the familiarity of a face, is a rapid creative synthesis that cannot, in principle, be explained as a mere sum of elemental physical features, and so, considering that quote, I have to conclude that a computer which can only ever experience the elemental physical features of the world, will never be capable of this creative synthesis. That's being described In my own thinking on this topic, and this is something that I think, from the beginning, has rubbed me the wrong way, in the way that we are being conditioned to talk about things like artificial intelligence.
Sam Gerdt:There were a lot of terms that started being used a lot more so in the general, you know, public conversation, we started hearing more and more about creativity. We started hearing more and more about generative AI and we started being I feel, we started being conditioned to believe that artificial intelligence was or would become something threatening to human creativity, and I immediately didn't like that. I didn't think it was accurate and I didn't think that it was healthy for us to even engage in that kind of thinking, and so, from the beginning, I've been trying to figure out why that is. You know, I have this gut reaction to it. But why do I have that gut reaction to it? And I, you know, I started my career. I went to art school, I studied graphic design, so I have a little bit of a background in art not quite fine art, but I've participated in the art world for a significant period of my life and what I see is a big difference between something that is creative and something that is generative.
Sam Gerdt:I feel like creative is a descriptor of content that, like what you're saying, there's a there's a leap there, it represents a progress that that was maybe unexpected, maybe much needed, but undiscovered. But there's something new in it, there's something novel in it, and I also feel like creativity has to be rare. I feel like there has to be a rarity to it, because how can you call something that's common creative, how can you call something that lacks that? It lacks that novelty, that leap that I think is needed. And with AI, I think what we're seeing that's difficult is we're seeing a blurring of the lines between the artist and the tool, and we're also seeing this blurring of the lines because of how fast things are going. We're seeing AI generated content that is truly beautiful and technical and it has all of the characteristics that we're accustomed to seeing, and something that really truly is creative. But the problem is that we haven't yet caught up to the fact that, because AI can do it now, now it's common.
Sam Gerdt:So when mid-journey first came out and we saw the images from this stable diffusion is another example the images that it was generating were striking. They were beautiful and they were very stylistic and they looked like art, and you could argue about the goodness or the badness of that art, but they looked very artistic. I saw that and I would say it looks creative but it's not. And I would say, in a year's time when 30 million people are subscribed to this tool and they each are generating 10 images a day, and you have 100 million, 200 million of these same kinds of images flooding into the internet every day, I have a feeling you're going to look at it and you're going to feel very differently about it than you do right now, seeing one or two of them here and there, because that commonality is going to make it feel uncreative to you.
Matt Saunders:I think I'm with you with what you've said, but there's a gap that opens up that I was thinking about when the creativity happens, and whether creativity is a singular act. We think about AI generating something quickly and we ask was that creative? I feel very strongly that all art, all aesthetics, all value is distributed value. Art is a language and it only is good if it means something and it has the capacity to last. The magic of art is that things can last for generations and work can be meaningless for decades, centuries, and then suddenly mean a lot to a lot of people. Maybe that's why I struggle with the word creativity, because it seems to arrive and just be, and I actually don't think that work's power exists in the world in that way. It might be very powerful in its moment of creation, through its novelty. It's a word that you used a lot, that I kind of chafed at as the ultimate value, but I have a much longer view of things. I think what really makes sense to me and what you're saying is the idea of flooding the market.
Matt Saunders:Something I really like about AI and the AI images we're seeing is that it puts pressure, I think, on our assumptions about value in art, words like beauty, words like artistic. I might define differently from a lot of people, and that's not that I'm right or people are wrong. We live in different contexts and we look at different things, but I think that there's a kind of unreflected assumption of some values, like the value of what we think of as beautiful. If the world is full of a certain type of soft focus, light infused, I don't know I'm trying to imagine what an AI beautiful image would be luminosity then will that continue to be beautiful? I think you're asking that question and I agree with that, because I do think that one of the things that AI is doing now for me is generating a lot of images that I think are pretty drecky.
Matt Saunders:I think that they are a little bit received ideas of what art might look like. I find most of them completely uninteresting, but I also see their appeal and I'm wrong to think they're uninteresting because so many people think that they're interesting. But I appreciate that they're so easy and that it's not going to replace artists, but artists are going to react to how the visual world has been changed by this type of image and the access and ability for people to create the AI to create all these images and that the creative responses will actually be the rejections of it or the people who find ways to actively step to the left of it and offer some kind of alternative. An alternative will only be good in the moment when the baseline is the flood of AI images, and then it will evolve.
Sam Gerdt:There was the article that you responded to. The question that you responded to in an article several months ago about this very question is AI art really art? One of the comments that you made in that article that I appreciated was that artists will be the one to help us imagine the new world that AI is helping us to create. The article I'm referencing here was published by the Harvard Gazette in August of 2023. It's called Is Art Generated by Artificial Intelligence Real Art? Here's exactly what Matt said in the article.
Sam Gerdt:To the question of whether AI can be a threat or a collaborator, I might respond that every new technology upends conventions and delivers not only new possibilities, but a new kind of material intelligence. I'm sure that many artists will be intrigued by the agency of AI and seek ways to grapple or collaborate with it. Many already are, and we should be grateful to be challenged and knocked out of our habits and assumptions. Most of the things that worry me about this fall into the realm of the social and ethical. I hope there are great artists to help us imagine around and work with this new reality.
Sam Gerdt:I think what you were saying is that the masses are going to use AI for a particular means and they're going to move the world in a particular direction.
Sam Gerdt:And those who are on the outskirts of that crowd, those who are more imaginative, those who are more creative, are going to help to pull that mass of people in a particular direction or help us to understand it in new ways.
Sam Gerdt:Because in some sense, the vast majority of people are just following the crowd. And there are those on the outskirts who look around and say you know, they're seeing further and they're looking at places that others aren't, and they're helping that crowd to imagine, to see what they see. I really appreciated that, but I think I appreciated it because it reinforced my own feelings, and that is that it's those people who stand on the outskirts of the masses who are looking elsewhere. Those are the people who are expressing themselves creatively, teaching others creatively, informing all of our imaginations and all of our thinking, and those end up also, I think, being the ones in other areas of life that are the innovators, that are the problem solvers who end up taking us places we never thought we would go. If we do arrive at a place where artificial intelligence truly isn't an entity among us, something of a peer, it will be because of those people, those innovators who did truly creative work. It will be the result of that.
Matt Saunders:I mean, the categories we're talking in are just too big to get that much traction, because I think you know the role of an artist who I would admire. The kind of artist that I'm interested in in my very narrow set of interests does many things. One is making images or ideas or objects that participate in a current conversation. I'm not that taken with the myth of the undiscovered genius and the attic that I think that there is a current conversation in the art world and there's a million art worlds and that you are making things that are part of that. Of course, the people who I'm really excited about and the people who, in retrospect, seem like the most important in the generations are the people who bring a particularly critical or transformative or a different perspective to things, and I think that you know that tends to have an aspect of criticism.
Matt Saunders:So the artists who are working with AI right now who I'm most interested in are the ones who are kind of pushing its limits, people who aren't even known yet. I have a former assistant who's trying to force the AI to break its own rules, you know, who's constantly working with the prompt and treating it as a kind of dialogue instead of focusing on the image or what could be created. He's focusing on the challenging creative activity of interacting with another maker and pushing boundaries, kind of getting it trying to force the AI to fight with him, and to me that's a kind of artistic, a creative approach to using the AI in line with conceptual art and kind of like generations of artists who've thought about arts relationship as pop to more popular culture, saying not to reject it but to find ways to cut under it or to lay things bare, or to add friction, add turbulence to what could be a smooth kind of marketplace.
Sam Gerdt:Does that necessarily lead you to the conclusion that AI itself could never be an artist?
Matt Saunders:I'm not smart enough to know that, because I assume that AI can internalize those strategies. The AI we're seeing now, I don't think is being fed David Hammons or other artists who've really worked against the grain, and people are using it to make images.
Sam Gerdt:Well, that's what I'm not entirely clear about is, you know, from a technical standpoint, ai can't respond with anything that it hasn't been trained on. That is, its responses are necessarily a diffusion of the data that it already has. And if the data that it already has is limited to what has already been made by people, then can AI add anything to the conversation? They've done experiments with this. Where the question is well, can AI generate its own training data? Because that right now is the commodity that's in short supply is training data. So the question is well, if you could take an LLM and from the training data that it already has, if it could generate new training data, maybe we could train a smarter LLM. And the end result is it devolves into nothingness. So when we use AI-generated content as training data for future AIs, we call this content synthetic data.
Sam Gerdt:Synthetic data is not generated by people, it is generated by AI. The usefulness of synthetic data is going to vary from case to case and model to model. So, for example, it makes a lot of sense to use synthetic data for training a self-driving AI, and we see a lot of support for this kind of synthetic data being used in this use case. But when it comes to generative models like the ones we're talking about here LLMs and diffusion models that are being used to create written and visual content the use of synthetic data to further train these models does have a degenerative effect.
Sam Gerdt:A July 2023 study entitled Self-Consuming Generative Models Go Mad went into great detail about this phenomenon. In the paper, the authors said Our primary conclusion across all scenarios is that without enough fresh, real data in each generation of an autophagous loop, future generative models are doomed to have their quality or diversity progressively decrease. Now, this is just one example, but the point that I'm trying to make is that the generative models we have today are not capable of synthesizing data in a way that could be considered additive. So that's where I'm wondering can an AI be an artist if it's incapable of contributing something novel to the conversation, if it's incapable of developing the conversation?
Matt Saunders:My understanding of the diffusion is that it's partially about adding static, and I think anytime you add, you make a space for the counterproductive, the irrational, the random, and then you hold that together with the form that you were given and judge whether it's working. I think that's kind of what an artist does. I feel like that is generative in a way that transcends its dataset or could be. Maybe it hasn't gotten there yet. I mean, of course I also am teaching, and when you're describing AI not being able to invent its own training set, I see people learn as artists in the classroom is very much. They have impulses, they have prompts for themselves, but things are always returning to what they think they know how to do what they think art looks like artists who they're trying to emulate. It's maybe not that far afield, it may just be kind of infant right now.
Matt Saunders:The thing that you know the MoMA piece, the Anadolp installation that was in the lobby of MoMA for many months. That was rethinking the collection. I watched it a number of times and I was very interested in what was happening, but to some extent what was profoundly boring to me about it was the format that it was given, the screen, which is the same screen that's used for other art installations in that space. It was given a kind of generic sound setup. I feel like the sound that became attached with the images felt like middle of the road video art sound to me. A lot of what I didn't like about the piece was that it was in a box that was predetermined to make it look like art and it made it look like video art and so I felt I had no sense of how creative the AI inside was able to be, because it was kind of confined as a screensaver and I don't know if there's something to impact in that. But I do feel like the ability for the intelligence to generate or express things outside. I don't know how you get outside the box that the AI is in, how things come into the world, because right now things do feel very confined by a lot of conventions of screen space, even just how pixels are coded, and so that's kind of an open question to me.
Matt Saunders:If I think about AI as a conceptual artist and I guess here we get into the rise of the machines and things where you do make me angry, that's I'm sorry I'm kind of going on and on now, but there was a generational clash when I was in graduate school in the early 2000s around the computer and people who were using computers as a digital tool, and one professor in particular.
Matt Saunders:But a number of the faculty members had this critique that was you can't use Photoshop because the tools in Photoshop are programmed by somebody else and so you don't have the same. There was some idea that, working within a format, you couldn't be creative because that format was already limiting you. And then of course it didn't account for the way that our generation was so native in Photoshop that people immediately found ways to work with it, and I think I arrived at that through my thinking about the AI's functional limitations. But that's kind of what I'm optimistic about about AI is I think that it's just going to be part of the bigger idiom, it's going to be part of our visual culture, and people artists always respond to visual culture, but it's also going to be a tool that people are. It'll be a tool that people are used to interacting with, and we'll find ways to have ideas of their own in relation to it. Do you feel?
Sam Gerdt:like the format, the medium. Do you feel that it matters at all or do you take a stance? You're a teacher. Do you take a stance with your students about the mediums that they choose to engage with or not? Obviously, you're paying attention to their expressions. You're paying attention to what it is that they're trying to communicate and, as students, they're exploring and they're not necessarily dead set on one particular direction. How do you inform that direction?
Matt Saunders:You think of all the things you could say to provoke somebody and all the things you could offer them as potential other tools and kind of follow your gut about what would be most generative. Sometimes people feel like they really have their grip on a certain way of working and you want to encourage them to develop their skills or to build on their strengths to explore other ideas. And sometimes you feel like someone's ideas are being confined by their default assumptions about how they're going to generate them and you try to give them a different tool to work with.
Sam Gerdt:I think that's a great example of what I see lacking in any kind of artificial intelligence for quite a while to come, and possibly even forever, it not being possible at all.
Matt Saunders:People sometimes ask me how do you teach art? And I actually think that that I don't know exactly how you teach art, but I know that the model of art education is a dialogic model. It's one of you making your work but then being confronted with other opinions and other suggestions, and it's always a kind of crowdsourcing, and certainly when people leave art school, that's the big challenge is how to generate all that for yourself. So I always feel like what I'm doing in the classroom is modeling all the ways that one can turn over a problem and all the ways that one doubles down on something, and all the techniques that I should have learned to keep myself moving and to generate ideas in the studio. Not that the people I'm talking to will do the same thing, but hopefully that they can have my voice in their head and they can build that for themselves.
Sam Gerdt:I'm just not sure how AI challenges itself Right. I'm not sure how it stretches itself and tries to force that model, breaking behavior independently. I see artists and I see technologists and even just normal people who are playing with the technology. I see them doing that and coming up with really interesting use cases and different results, but I see the vast majority of people just using it as it's presented to them, in the ways that are suggested to them, and then what happens is the fork in the road, the divide gets wider. So those who are challenging it and really really pushing it are the ones who are generating truly unique, novel, creative outputs, and the ones who are just using it are the ones who are contributing to that mass of unimpressive you know, hotel art, thomas Kinkade type art.
Sam Gerdt:I think the same idea applies to all uses of AI. People who simply use the system, the systems that they're given, they won't be standouts in the areas of productivity or effectiveness. The people who create new systems or subvert systems, those will be the ones who excel. So, as we look in recent history, I think the creation of the internet is a good analogous example. The internet is an incredibly powerful tool and it has done amazing things to change the world, but the way that it affects individuals is the same across the board. I'm no different than you in the fact that we have the internet and it helps us to be productive and effective, but if you compare me to someone who, say, knows how to subvert the internet, knows how to hack, knows how to program, knows how to build new things, new architectures, new infrastructures, that person has a significant advantage over me. You can go even further back in history and see examples of this as well.
Sam Gerdt:In the 17th century, a few mathematicians were experimenting with square roots of negative numbers. They were breaking all the rules of math and most intelligent people thought they were nuts. Rene Descartes was the one who coined the term imaginary numbers, and he totally meant it as a slam. Fast forward to now, and the world as we know it couldn't exist without imaginary numbers. Most applied mathematics that we use in electrical and civil engineering only works with imaginary numbers. So the computer that you're working on right now or the car that you're driving in, this technology that we're using right now, could not exist if those rule-breaking mathematicians had not dared to experiment with something that most people thought couldn't or shouldn't exist Before that Leonardo da Vinci first theorized and then proved how the circulatory system worked.
Sam Gerdt:The popular belief of the day was that the liver made the blood and pushed it out to the periphery, where it was absorbed by the various tissues of the body. To discover the truth, da Vinci performed dozens of human dissections, many of which were illegal. He performed surgeries and experiments on live pigs in order to see the blood flowing in the body. He studied the fluid dynamics of water in rivers. He constructed his own artificial hearts out of glass or wax. Da Vinci's drawings and discoveries were a full 450 years ahead of their time.
Sam Gerdt:So the question that I keep asking myself is if AI gives us a system within which to operate and that system has rules, and even if hekm memCH dies, what is the means by which we improve upon that system? In all of human history, it seems, the means of improvement was to break the rules, and is an AI equipped to do that? I think what I feel, especially everything that you've said, talking about how you know you have this gut instinct and you have to, you know, constantly be challenging, and all of these, there's all of these little pieces of what you're saying, and I'm like, yeah, I just don't. I don't see how an AI can ever break out of the math of what it is and make those leaps. Hmm, but you know, maybe time will tell. I just there just doesn't seem yet to be a mechanism. That part still seems to be science fiction.
Matt Saunders:I'm just nodding because I'm you've thought about this a lot more than I have, and I buy that I will. That sounds right to me if that's where we are. I'm just not sure.
Sam Gerdt:I don't know. First, you see it Like a lot of what happens is so far behind closed doors. All I see is all I see is what the world has like, what we're given, and I see you know what millions of people are doing with it generally. And then I hear people like you who have decades of experience creating and teaching others to create and to participate in these thoughtful conversations through various means, including art and all of the mediums within art, and I just I don't see any of that happening. When people take the tool that they're given and just apply it, it's the ones who are like I'm going to take this and I'm going to break it who are actually like finding anything creative inside of it. But it's them. It's the act of, it's the act of breaking it, it's the means by which they break it, it's the choice to break it and then to iterate on that process over and over and over again. That seems to be generating any amount of real innovation or value, whether it's artistic or technological. They're all agree with you.
Matt Saunders:I mean, personally, I have not seen any AI generated images. That I was. That I remember, yeah, but but I get, and it's crazy that I'm now advocating for AI in some sense. I don't want to predict that that's not going to develop. I mean, I know, before the current model, there was more of an adversarial model. There was the idea of having two different programs, one generating and one judging, and you know, I think that there's certainly ways that that this can get more and more complicated. This, those creators who start to work with AI maybe maybe AI as a solo entity doesn't become creative for a long time, but as a half of a kind of partnership, I could see it really being a being a productive tool.
Matt Saunders:I do, you know, when you were talking, I was thinking to the artists who have centered AI as a topic in the kind of art world that I'm tuned into, who I found most exciting and provocative, have not been working with the tools that we're talking about.
Matt Saunders:I think that this shift in the last couple of years towards mid journey or dally has created a different, has created a certain type of beast that's based on making pictures quickly.
Matt Saunders:Yeah, isn't exactly where it doesn't cover all of AI. So I'm thinking of people like Ian Chang or Pierre Huig, both of whom have thought more about the idea of sentience in life and kind of making artworks that question whether something is live or whether life can be contained within the space of a video in Ian's work, or Pierre has a a big piece in Kistifos, norway, that is a forest that was scanned and then built as a built as a digital environment with an AI God that's mutating and creating variants and so there's this overlay of this kind of pristine wilderness and then this mirror of it that exists, guided by different intelligence, and he's like running these things and seeing how they start to. He's taking things that have been generated in the AI and actually making them in real life and putting them into the forest, and it becomes this kind of a multiverse idea. But those, to me, are not well, they're not an interesting. I think both of these pieces have made me think a lot about our future, with potential of living minds and machines, much more than any of the any of the pictures.
Sam Gerdt:You talked about two, two AIs challenging one another. One of the things that that they do in in training AIs like mid journey or Dolly or some of the the more common ones, is they'll use human feedback to inform the the rightness, the correctness of the response to the prompt. So that kind of human feedback was it turned out to be incredibly important in in the training process in order to get the results that that we get, and you still see this today. You can, you can actually provide your own feedback in in all of these tools, whether it's an image generation tool or a text generation tool like chat, gbt, and that feedback is invaluable in improving the product. The issue there that might be worth talking about is that you have so many people providing that feedback.
Sam Gerdt:The baseline is quite standard, it's not, it's not deviating, and so when you have artists who are in some sense challenging themselves or challenging other artists, you I feel like there's this distancing, this distancing from the norm, and I feel like, with the kind of human feedback that we provide to an AI, all it's doing is consolidating into a single, almost a singularity of the normal. I actually kind of think that that's more of from a, from an intellectual standpoint that's probably more of a of an existential threat than even, like you know, whether or not they can. You know, cause a nuclear winter is. Is this idea that that our human knowledge is going to be reduced? It's not going to be. It's not going to be varied and diverse, it's going to be standardized, globalized Is is it not already?
Sam Gerdt:I mean.
Sam Gerdt:I think, it's more so than maybe a hundred years ago. I mean, technology, the internet certainly has connected us in ways that nobody ever imagined, and so, yeah, human knowledge and experience is definitely more globalized and more standardized now than it was, and there are good aspects of that and there are bad aspects of that. But what happens if, if you go to the extreme with it and there's only one? There's only one answer. It's not that it's right or wrong or that you know, it's just that we've, we've trained and we've trained and we've trained, and now there's no more room for any more feedback and and there's in some sense you would have to have you start from scratch, train something new, but by that point you've conditioned the people, and so the people are thinking less differently than they were a hundred years ago, and so now when the people train the new thing, they'll be less capable of training a diverse thing.
Matt Saunders:It's very dystopian. I think I have a better, a more confident view of human nature in some regards. I'd say not in regards to peace, but I have a lot of filmmaking friends. I mean also because I teach in a department that has filmmaking and of course that's constantly been the conversation about the Hollywood models and what's allowed and how, how things get made, and it's a question of marketplaces, it's a question of economies as well. I think there's always, always going to be a lot of people who want to do the opposite, and so it's more question of. To me, it's not a question of whether that creativity will emerge or exist in human imagination. It's like are we going to have a society where it can be made? So I don't know.
Matt Saunders:I spoke earlier about you know I said it puts pressure on language. That's my strongest reaction a lot of times, looking to AI I mean even some of the articles you sent over for me to read, you know is one where it's asked to make a Renaissance painting, and I'm looking at this image and thinking there's zero in this image that has to do with the painting. You know that this is like it's an idea of painting that's completely traveled through a cultural flattening into a style that is recognizable to the computer's painting, and it's that word is is totally undone and even the monk you know there's Kermit the frog is monk. It is zero relationship, I would say, to the things that were made by the historical person, edvard Munch, but has 100% relationship to the poster of the screen. And so, really, you know, my experience of AI is both complete irritation combined with the kind of provocation, the kind of sense of how, how ideas and language and styles, how visual ideas move into very broad understanding and get kind of misrepresented or get transformed, and so forces me to grapple with thinking about what is Munch from my perspective, having just gone to look at a ton of his work in the last couple of weeks, or what is a painting? And I bristle, of course, I think, oh you idiots, that's not a painting at all. That is the flattest idea you can imagine it. But then it's up to me to respond to that. You know, we're going to live in this world and and you know, and if it forces me to be outraged and feel like people are misunderstanding, maybe that pivots my work to engaging with those feelings more, versus just assuming that we're all communicating and that's, for me, the silver lining is that it, like things that have happened in all kinds of pop culture.
Matt Saunders:I think it has flattened, but it also creates a space for a different type of of weirdness. On top of the form. It just becomes a different point of reference or kind of touched on it Does it? Does it piss me off when people are sharing images that I think are absolutely banal and saying how amazing they are. Do I think? Don't be an idiot, come to the museum with me. Yes, of course I think that, but I don't know what else we can do. It's how culture is all.
Sam Gerdt:You're highlighting the exact same feelings that I have in different areas. You're highlighting how you look at an AI-generated image and there's an immediate recognition of what it is and you're highlighting the fact that, in that recognition, you've already made a decision about it and you're already moving on, and there's a sense in which a person can make themselves even less distinct than if they did nothing by generating the AI image. It's like you've just classified yourself in some sense in my mind, because I recognize immediately what you've done. There's nothing creative about it. It falls into the exact same category as every other AI-generated image I've ever seen. And then I'm so quickly moving on. I'm ready to move to the next thing, and I'm not necessarily saying that that's exactly what you just said, but I have felt that way.
Sam Gerdt:Certainly, and going back to what I said earlier, that you used words that I think better describe how I was feeling cultural, flattening this idea of removing the diversity and variation that exists within cultures and giving us all just a baseline understanding of the rightness or wrongness of something, the goodness or badness of something.
Sam Gerdt:If we look at life 100 years ago versus life now, I feel like the disconnected nature of humanity, the localization of it resulted in wildly distinct opinions, worldviews, art, all kinds of distinction. And the more that you expose yourself to all of the rest of the world and everyone else participates in that as well that distinction starts to flatten, it starts to diminish. So I guess you could phrase that as a question what are some of the differences that you see between an artist who is a more modern artist, who is exposing himself to all of the world, all of culture, who's absorbing all of that, versus, maybe, an artist from centuries past who was very local, his experiences were very limited? Do you see those differences when you look at their work? Do you feel those differences, or do you interpret it all from your own perspective?
Matt Saunders:Of course to see those differences and of course I interpret it. I feel like we can't undo the interconnected nature of the world and I think that we're projecting, maybe backwards, a little bit of difference on things that feel from a very different time. You know, if you think about whatever, like Baraceli in Florence is living in a Catholic monoculture with near parameters, never left his side going to Rome once. He never left Florence. There's a flattening to that. Perhaps Now we see it in relationship to other things that are happening. So we don't see it as a flattening. But I share your anxiety, but not maybe your pessimism.
Sam Gerdt:That's a pretty common response.
Matt Saunders:And yeah, I, I am not. I am someone who has A mixed relationship to kind of the biggest kinds of pop culture. I'm a little out of it and I've worked in my own work kind of against it. I've tended to be more interested in unearthing stories and kind of digging into the archives and countercultures. But that's more who I am. That's not a claim that everyone should be like that.
Matt Saunders:Growing up in the sort of late 20th century, the art history we were taught about painting was always about the crisis of photography, the idea that photography comes along and this is, of course, a very flat description of this idea but the photography replaces the representational function of painting and that opens up a century of abstraction and innovation and crisis.
Matt Saunders:It's more complicated than that. But if we if enough people are feeling a crisis of flattening out of AI, then there's a really interesting crisis that we can work with. I don't think that we're trapped. We're trapped to live in a world where it's going to be full of these images. Yes, that's going to happen no matter what, but I don't think that as artists we're not able to push back against that. If that starts to feel suffocating, I found myself thinking really quickly about number of artists who emulate popular forms, like artists who try to become pop stars, or the large number of artists who get successful and then try to make a feature film and there is this kind of artistic creative impact to infiltrate or to act the culture. So I wonder, if an artist acts as AI, how that, what that space might be at some point, like impersonating Dolly, hacking someone's system and never mind Cut that part of the video.
Sam Gerdt:I know Matt felt like he was derailing the conversation with this admittedly silly idea, but here I am in the edit a few weeks later and I cannot help but Google this idea of humans impersonating AI. So, without getting too sidetracked, here are two interesting examples that I found. Last summer, several creators on TikTok started trending for their NPC live streams. They would stand in front of the camera with their hands held awkwardly in front of them and sway back and forth like an AI video game character. Viewers could pay money to send virtual gifts to these streamers and the streamers would react to the gifts in the same canned way that you'd expect from an AI avatar. It is absolutely bizarre. You can go on TikTok and find these people still doing this, but apparently it's wildly popular and the whole thing reminds me of the living statue street performers in New York City. The second example I found is from 2018 and it's a startup strategy and it's called pseudo AI.
Sam Gerdt:There were several cases reported where startup companies would present themselves to investors or customers as AI powered companies, but the processes that were supposed to have been AI powered were actually offshore contractor powered. The idea was to reduce or delay the initial development costs of implementing AI powered services, so, by taking advantage of cheaper offshore labor. Startups could more efficiently prototype their processes. Once they scaled, they could hand things over to the AI systems.
Sam Gerdt:What I found interesting about this example is the people that they interviewed for the articles that I found who were doing this work were expressing how much they hated it, how mundane it was, how much they could not wait for a bot to take their job. So in answer to Matt's question of what would it look like, I kind of think imitating AI, imitating the computer, looks boring, it looks bland, it looks unappealing, and I think that says something about the conversation we're having here. The experience of being human seems to me to be far better than the experience of being a computer when you look at the students coming in today the art students coming in now and you compare them to maybe when you were first starting as a student.
Sam Gerdt:What are some of the biggest generational differences that you see when answering the same questions? Like you know, what is? Creativity, what is art?
Matt Saunders:That's a really good question and there are definite differences. There are differences about the assumption of what art does and where it lives. Certainly, I have one really great student in particular whose highest goal is to be on Instagram and those are fundamentally different ideas about what you're actually producing and what's circulating. A sense of what role materiality plays in a work is quite different.
Matt Saunders:I think the thing that I quote the most is something that a lot of artists quote I'm not even sure if it's possible, but it's always attributed to Ed Ruscha and it's this idea that some work you look at and you say wow, huh, but that he loves work that you say huh, wow, you know. That made so much sense to me when I was told that, because I believe that work should be difficult and should open up and should be inscrutable and should be complicated to read, and I think that that fundamental sense of values has shifted a bit. I think that the legibility, efficiency, speed of consumption, delivery of a message, what I would call the kind of more illustrative quality of work, which was a very pejorative term when I was in school, is now a positive for a lot of people how quickly we consume these images, how quickly we read the thing and judge it.
Sam Gerdt:I hadn't thought too much about this shift in favor of the illustrative until Matt mentioned it, but it's something that I also recognize. It's an evolution that makes sense when you consider how our world has changed over the past 30 years. We live in an attention economy, in a digital world. Now. The demand for things like graphic design and digital illustration has skyrocketed since the mid-90s, and that demand tugs on everything. The way we look at art is changing too. The pace at which we consume and demand new content is mind-numbing. Compared to previous decades, we look at art on four-inch screens instead of a canvas. In having a conversation about creativity, it's hard to ignore the fact that our collective definition of the word itself and the standard by which we measure it has changed radically, and I would argue that it's not changing for the better, but for the worse.
Matt Saunders:And there are ideas that come up around the AI question, around rightness, around function, around efficiency that I think, for some of my generation, raised some hackles. In relation to the creativity, I fundamentally don't think that art is problem solving. I feel like it's making propositions which may or may not mean anything to anyone, and if they mean something to someone, then they become a great proposition. But I don't feel like I'm ever I mean so consciously on some level.
Matt Saunders:You, of course, are, but I generally don't feel like I'm judging my work in terms of does it do what it should do? It's more what did it do and is that something worth keeping? Is it a hope that it arrives at some provocative, unexpected state? Maybe that's the jump over the fence that I started out by talking about as creativity. If it's not what I expected it to be and it seems better, then that's the work that I cherish and put out into the world and that's kind of my approach to making. But I think that I take very seriously that I don't. That doesn't seem like an immediately shared value.
Sam Gerdt:As an artist yourself, your work tends to be a mixture of material and digital. Yeah, mixture of physical and digital. You definitely do a lot of experimenting with both. Do you have a?
Matt Saunders:favorite? Oh, 100%. The digital is secondary and comes in almost in terms of its flexibility in showing the work. Most of the digital things I do are digital videos which are made out of real. The work is always made with real materials and then scanned, and I'm very conscious that between the scan and the experience of the installation or the projection in the gallery there's a lot of things you can do in the digital space. That's a kind of digital materiality and I do play with that and experiment with that. But everything starts on the page. It starts with, in my case, a brush of some kind, because I hate pencils.
Sam Gerdt:But yeah, again it's. Will an artificial intelligence ever express anything like that?
Sam Gerdt:I mean even just like I always start this way because I hate that. It's like, well, wait a minute, what do you mean? You're gonna have to explain that to me. It's that, it's that diversity. I think that that makes it so, so appealing, anything so appealing.
Sam Gerdt:And as soon as you, as soon as you remove that element, I'm in marketing now, and so, like, what is marketing except to pull on an emotional string? I just don't. I don't see how we are doing any better, accomplishing that by being overly dependent on on these tools, when all that they do seems to be reductive, and maybe that's like you said, I tend to be a pessimist with these things. Even you talk about the generational differences, your students. I've talked to other professors before and they've said exactly the same thing.
Sam Gerdt:I have, I have, students whose goal, whose aspiration is to be, is to be, on social media. I bristle at that because it seems to me to be foolish in so many ways. But the flip side of that is, I'm also belonging to a generation who just doesn't get it in the same way, and that's why I asked about, you know, the generation that you're teaching now it seems like they're. They're living more of a digital life, and so the the conversations that they're having are going to be digital, and the the ways that they're thinking and the issues that are affecting them are going to be digital. I, I'm, I'm with you. I much prefer the material, but I also don't have any interest in living in that digital world, in that digital space there's such a diversity of spaces in which to live.
Matt Saunders:Yes, it's would seem horrendous to me to be to be big on social media, but I extend that also to the idea of genres and and something that I always thought about visual art is that it's behind a lot of other types of art making, like within, you know, within music.
Matt Saunders:We really understand the diversity of different types of music and what genres different things fit into, and it's absolutely commonplace to say I like this and I don't like this, but we do seem to often have this kind of fatalitarian impulse to define all the art of a time and I've never seen it that way. There's so much art that I respect and I respect people's desire to want to do that, but I have absolutely no interest in making that kind of work. For me at the moment, ai is very much in that category. But the world changes and new, you know, new genres come and new places to live come and I am curious about next generations and what options they have and and I'm trying to understand it, which is maybe why I'm so open-minded right now you talked about the flatness of Botticelli, living in Florence's whole life, hardly ever leaving except for the one time, and how.
Sam Gerdt:That is a flat existence in its own way. And how, the the differences you know. From our perspective, we see. We see that existence with all of the. You know thousands and millions of other existences and we can appreciate each of them for their diversity. Looking at all of them together and how, now, with the, with a more global view, global mindset, there there seems to be a global flattening in some sense. It seems like there's a whole lot of value in understanding where you live and where you belong and what your particular.
Sam Gerdt:As individuals we can't live these incredibly diverse lives. We are going to have our own flatness to us, as you know, beings living in a particular place at a particular time, with particular beliefs and experiences. There's flatness in that. But understanding where you belong and then staying there and developing it and developing that conversation with other unique individuals, while maintaining your integrity, that seems to be to me the goal of any artist today to know who you are and and what, what your purpose is and and what your belief is, and then taking that and interfacing with other people who are doing the same thing. The threat from AI that I think I've talked about could be restated as the antithesis of that idea. People know less of who they are and where they belong. They know less of their individuality, their uniqueness, and they see themselves as being just one tiny piece of this big, more fists blob of people and culture and just a mishmash of everything. Yeah so, yeah, so I wow.
Matt Saunders:It's such an interesting thought yeah, so dark, I mean it's so dark and with you on that. I think it's a well, this is no.
Sam Gerdt:I was just gonna say this has been one of the weirdest conversations about AI that I've ever had.
Matt Saunders:I feel like I leave with more questions than I came in with and I keep coming back to the, to the film idea that came up and and the sort of the history of of that medium.
Matt Saunders:Since it's relatively short, you can look at it and think about the way that studios consolidated the ability to make films and you have an era that goes through all the studio codes and then there's a moment when the tools change and indie cinema becomes, you know, accessible and then that gets consolidated and you know we're living in a moment of kind of consolidation around television and film, but also in opening up of all the tools, including AI, that can make movies.
Matt Saunders:I have we haven't talked about this, but I do have I've encountered film students at Harvard who are using AI to edit their clips and even generate things, and you know, I think there's some curiosity about that, but that's part of where I have hope about this is. I feel like right now, all our, all our anxiety is up and all our eyes are focused on one or two big platforms, and it seems very flattening. But I do. You know, I have to assume that things will come along that will change those dynamics and create radically different versions of AI creators and maybe a kind of underground and off, off cycle, and I could be totally wrong.
Matt Saunders:But there's the basic question you started with about creativity, but for me that immediately gets into questions of the marketplace and the tools of production, the means of production for that, and yeah, and I think that we're at the real infancy of accessibility and and use of AI.
Sam Gerdt:So hopefully goes and hopefully people mess with it in the right ways yeah, well, for my part, I, I put my, I put my money on the artists and the innovators and the technologists who are doing that breaking, who are doing that challenging and who aren't, who are resisting the urge to just join. You know, go go with that flow of of where these tools might take us, especially in their infancy, because, over and over and again, again, I feel like that gets validated in everything that I see the ones who are actually adding value to the world or the ones who are, who are trying to break AI who are?
Sam Gerdt:trying to recreate it into something different than what it is, not the ones who are using it, right? Yeah, yeah, well, that is an interesting discussion. I love that, matt, I thank you for. Thank you for talking to me. It was, it was a real pleasure. You are an incredibly interesting person to talk to. I love your ideas and maybe maybe in time we reconnect and see how you know how we feel about what we've said, how we've changed, how we've been changed and, and at some point I'm sure we're both going to have to engage with AI a little bit more, break some, break down some of those walls that that we have, those those resistances that exist, and and I I would love to see, like, what happens with that yeah, yeah, no, thank you very much.
Matt Saunders:It was really I'm. It was surprising that you reached out and I've really enjoyed the conversation.