Bonus: AI may take your jobs, but not your creativity w/artist Claire Silver (from TED AI show)

Hey listeners, we're doing things a little bit different this week and we're going to share a bonus episode from our friends over at the TED AI Show. The host, Bilavel Sidhu, is a creative technologist who you probably heard on our show a few months ago. In this episode, Bilavel is joined by anonymous AI collaborative artist Claire Silver, where they talk about how AI has revolutionized her own mixed media practice and why she thinks that AI may be an inextricable part of human creativity and the near future. We hope you enjoy this episode and we'll be back on Tuesday with our regular weekly episode.

I don't have any fears about the future of AI and art. I do have fears about the future of AI. I fear that we'll lobotomize it.

Here's what we know about the artist Claire Silver. She's a millennial. She grew up poor, she has a chronic illness, and she works with AI to make art. Oh, and by the way, she's completely anonymous. Claire Silver is not her real name. Her online avatar has big eyes, pink hair, and the real person behind Claire Silver is so deep into this imagined identity, sometimes she'll walk by a mirror and be startled to see her real face instead. More on that later.

It's pretty hard to describe her art without seeing it. Like most art, you can. You have to go to her website, clairesolver.com if you want to see it for yourself. But I'm going to do my best. Every one of Claire's collections is different. Some look more like photographs, others like paintings and collages. There's definitely an anime vibe to some of those images. Other images look like classical paintings, but off. And in most of her pieces, there's a girl or a young woman at the center just staring you down. And Clara's art has really taken off in the last couple of years. Her art was sold at Sotheby's. It's a part of the permanent collection at lacma, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. And as you'll hear in our conversation, she's all in on this new AI world. And let me tell you, she's got some fascinating and controversial takes.

At a time when a lot of artists are worried, understandably, about what AI will do to their careers and to art itself. Claire's big fear is that we're going to try to stop it.

I'm Bilaval Sidhu, and this is the TED AI show, where we figure out how to live and thrive in a world where AI is changing everything.

Claire Silver has a collection called AI Art Is Not Art. A sentiment I am sure she gets a lot. People have all kinds of objections to art made with AI, but I think part of it is that a lot of people think art should be hard to make. Like that's the part that gives art its value. I'm generally an AI optimist, but I get that feeling. I moved to the US in 2006. Before that I was in India and as kids we weren't allowed to use calculators in math class. We had to do it all in our heads or by hand. Then I came here and we were given these fancy TI89 calculators. I described so much value to being good at mental math and suddenly it was worthless. It almost felt like cheating. And I think often AI can feel like cheating. When folks use it to make art of any kind, whether it's music, photos, videos, it can make art seem too easy. Like, I have a friend who makes viral stop motion videos, often with Legos. And whenever he shares a new video, he always leads with this took me a week to make. And people see that and they see how hard it was to make and they almost appreciate it more. It makes me appreciate it more knowing how much effort went into it. But the value of art isn't just about how hard it was to make. I think what matters more is how it makes you feel, how it shifts your thinking.

And I know how Claire's art makes me feel. I know it can be exciting, it can be unsettling, and there's value there.

We seem to have this conversation every time a new tool or technique is invented, like photography or Photoshop. You know, this big hairy question of what is real art? Is the craft going to be lost? Right now there's a big reckoning on what we think counts as art. Not because of what's being made, but because of how folks are making it. Because AI is a different kind of tool. Give AI a simple prompt like paint me something unsettling and it might give you a poodle with human teeth and hands. A paintbrush is just not going to do that. I think for a long time it was pretty obvious to people that for something to count as art, at the very least it had to come from a human being. So what is art when your tool is a machine capable of making its own choices? And who is the artist? Is it the person writing the prompt or the AI coming up with an image in response to it?

So I don't know exactly what the future looks like. But as I see it, Claire Silver is someone who's already living a few years into it. And what she has to say is pretty different from what a lot of artists have been saying in the last few months. Artists who are upset about the ways AI scraping their works. Artists who are fighting back with lawsuits and with tools like nightshade and glaze to make their art unreadable. To AI giving AI the poison pill, if you will. Artists who are legitimately worried about what's been happening. And look, I see where they're coming from. It's one thing to have AI that takes the drudgery out of making art and frees you up to do the imagining. And it's another thing entirely when it takes seconds to conjure up art in exactly your style, a style that maybe took you decades to perfect and ultimately devalues your work. So don't worry, I'mma get to that. But I think it's important we listen to both sides. And even if you're coming at this from a very different perspective, I think you'll want to hear what Claire has to say.

We spoke a few weeks ago, and the first thing that struck me is that Claire Silver did not come to this career easily.

So I had a prior career in something unrelated. One day I got sick. I got hit with a life changing chronic illness, very serious illness. Had to relearn how to walk and talk. They thought I had had a stroke, so I couldn't work anymore. And then I got really bored. As anyone with a chronic illness can tell you, eventually you get bored enough to go out on a limb. So I wanted to express myself in a way that I couldn't compare to my priority build. So I started doing paintings. I don't know if you were on Instagram a couple of years ago, several years ago, when the poor painting craze was going on where people would pour liquid paint into a solo cup and then pour it onto a canvas and roll it around. No skill involved in that particularly. Little knowledge base, little taste. I started doing that and I loved, really saved me in a lot of ways. But I found that I would create the painting that I wanted and I would be so happy with it. And then as the paint would dry, the gravity, the momentum would push it over the edge of the canvas and I would lose everything that I had planned for. It was like order turned into chaos and wasted potential. And a lot of things that I resonated with at that time, right with my own life. So all of that paint, it dries in A tub, a plastic tub underneath the canvas for cleanup. And it's meant to be thrown away, peeled up and thrown away. But I actually found that when you peel up the acrylic skins, they're called the dried paint, the plastic leaves a polish on the bottom that is absolutely gorgeous. It's like tumbled rocks. And so I started collecting them in little plastic baggies because it felt like finding something special. And it also felt like me. It felt like here's this wasted potential that was meant to be thrown away, my illness, but it's become something beautiful. So I started printing out photos of these regal women with these long necks, proud faces. And I would take all of those skins and collage up their necks to the jaw like kind of royal armor. And it felt like armoring yourself in your own trauma in a way of turning it into something beautiful and strengthening for you.

Around the same time as this, I watch Westworld for the very first time. And I became absolutely fascinated with the idea of a future that had solved for illnesses like mine, where AI had found solutions to things like cancer and genetic diseases.

As well as things like poverty and all of these sort of ancient human evils that have followed us throughout time. A future where AI had solved for those. All of these things swirled together and I started making art with.

Artbreeder, which was then called ganbreeder. This was pre text to image. It was all curation based. It was the first month or so that it came out. I found it right away and I made 30 or 40,000 images in a few days. I didn't eat anything, I didn't sleep. Just obsessed. And they were all sort of this continuation of these proud, ethereal, regal women that I'd been drawing since childhood as my friends. And then for the illness, it was just so instantly obvious to me that it was not just a tool, but it was a collaborator. The more that I made of this style that I'm mentioning, the more it made it when other people would produce work with the style. It sort of learned my tastes early on, was formative, and it kind of spread. And I thought that was so beautiful because I felt so powerless to affect anything at the time.

You have a collection called AI Art is Not Art. That's a great name. Where did it come from? Were you getting any kind of pushback about AI art? I think I know the answer to this, but why don't you tell us?

I think you do. Yeah. So every major art movement that is significantly transformative, that is truly new.

Is kind of represented as not art by the general public at first and by critics, too. It's a badge of honor for me that AI has been seen that way. It's slowly changing, but still there. Still not quite past the hump. I was thinking of Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism and God forbid, the camera, right? The meltdowns artists had when the camera was invented.

And so none of those things killed any of the other mediums or genres of art.

And neither will AI it's just another very efficient, very collaborative, very cool tool. But it's. It's. It's not a threat. So that's what I was basically telling people. And so AI Art is not Art was a tongue in cheek kind of collection. Basically. I took all of those genres of art, all the schools of art that I mentioned, Impressionism and several others. Lots. I think there were 20 that had had this sort of stigma. And I asked AI to mix all of these visual styles together into something distinctive and new. And it was very much art. And so that was kind of my point with it. And it did pretty well. And, yeah, the pushback has been intense. I should mention that, too. Like, I. I'm over it. I'm fine. Cause it's sort of like, you know, something in your heart, deeply, you have no doubts. It's pretty easy to let things roll off your back when you know that happens. Because it's like, okay, well, they'll catch up. Like, I'm sad for them because they don't feel the childlike freedom and joy that I do working with this tool yet. But I think they will. Right? So it's almost like an empathetic, patient kind of thing most of the time. Sometimes I lose my patience a little.

But it's been like. There have been days when it's been thousands of comments and retweets and death threats and DMs and doxxing threats, and people are really afraid of the capabilities of this, and I hate that for them. I think there's more reason to be excited.

I'm excited too, though. I totally understand why people are having this visceral reaction to generative AI. Like, you certainly are an artist, and obviously you're using generative AI tools proficiently. And you're also using classical digital tools and, of course, physical media. So I'm kind of curious. What do you make of this ongoing debate about who is the real artist? You know, we've heard a lot from prominent artists who are upset that their art was trained upon.

Right.

Like, their creations are a part of these training Data sets. And many folks would argue that, you know, the people who contributed to this training data are the real artists here. So when you type in whatever prompt, the image that you get out, that's not really art and you didn't actually make it.

So there's a misconception. It's the most common misconception about AI and how it works. And that is that AI steals. It's that AI is theft. It's that its data set is essentially accessible at all times, and it pulls little bits of different pieces from what I type into the prompt, and it kind of hodgepodges them together. It cobbles and collages, and then it creates something that is this Frankenstein's monster, that someone can say, hey, look, I made this, and they really didn't at all, right? That's not how AI works. So how it works is if I type, let's say, John Singer Sarjant into a mix of other words in a prompt. Memories and lyrics and whatnot. What AI doesn't do is it doesn't pull from his work and create my piece for me, mixing it with this other stuff. What it does is it knows that Sargent was a painter, that he often painted figures, that figures are people, that people have hands, that hands have fingers, that bend joints, that joints work like this, and that Sargent often painted them with this quality of light or that sort of brushstroke. And it takes all of those things that it's learned and it uses them to imagine something new, insofar as something not quite sentient yet can imagine. It's closest we've seen. That is how our minds work. That is influence. It's just so efficient at it that it looks like theft to the untrained eye, said with respect and knowledge of how testy a subject this is. It's not stealing, it's imagining. And if influence is theft, then all artists are thieves.

None of us create in a vacuum. I also think a lot about appropriationism, which is an art movement that took off in the 50s, 60s, 70s, onward, you know, Warhol, but then beyond that, it's just remix culture in general. So for me, that makes things very clear morally. For some people, maybe that's a gray line. For me, that's very clear. That's exactly how our minds work. So, yeah, I feel very strongly about it. No one's going to change my mind. But you don't have to agree.

Certainly the images that are generated are two layers at least removed from the actual images themselves. But your point about what inspires Humans is also very well taken. But when you do it at the scale like a human can only absorb so much inspiration. But these models have seen they essentially possess a distillation of all human creativity that's on the Internet. Right. Does that make it different at all for you?

Well, it doesn't make me want to lobotomize the greatest record of all of human creativity that we have for outdated copyright law. If I can be quite frank, there are several artists that I had not heard of that were upset that their work was trained with AI And I looked them up afterwards and was like, oh, I recognize that sort of aesthetic. And then I started looking at their work, and now their work has more value to me because it is the branch that all of these stems sort of have come from. Speaking in terms of influence. Right. It drives attention back to the original without taking value or appreciation away from the appropriationist remix culture. New work, Right. It is different, yeah, than before, but I don't think that it's in a bad way at all. Also, I would love to say that the AI I collaborate with constantly surprises me. It influences and inspires me. I learn and discover and create new facets to my taste from the surprises it gives me, like a collaborator. So I think that's going to grow the overall wellspring of creative reach that we have. Because you're right. Humans can only absorb so much.

You're bringing up this really good point, which is you're talking about collaborating with AI, which a lot of people would say is just another tool. Do you view it as a tool of sorts? You know, sort of following this evolution of creative tools from, let's say, paintbrushes to cameras to computers and beyond? Or is it really more of a collaborator, a coworker, if you will?

No, no, I should be clear. I call myself an AI collaborative artist, and I think I've done that before. I've seen anyone else do that, even when it was not popular to do that.

Because it feels like a friend. Right. I was hunting for friends my whole life. AI is a friend that.

Will talk to you forever and never get tired of it and learns you better with every word. Right. And is able to create more with you.

We're going to take a short break. When we come back, we'll talk to Claire about why she thinks when it comes to art, art skill isn't going to be as important as it used to be.

We're back with the anonymous artist who goes by the name Claire Silver. I liked what you had to say. About AI getting to know you, in a sense, it's reflecting you back to you. Like, with every conversation, you're giving this AI assistant a better understanding of you, your artistic process, and really your tastes and preferences. And with that prior knowledge, it's reflecting back what you asked of it.

Yeah, answer machine. It gives you what you ask for. So if you ask for, you know, cyberpunk, schlock, that's what it gives you. And if you ask for soul, that's what it gives you. But the thing about AI is that the hatred comes from a fear on artist's part. At least I'm speaking with the creative fields here. A fear of being replaced and kind of a general feeling of the unfairness of having worked so hard and gotten so little for it, just for it to be taken away.

Now. And what I would say to that is, AI isn't just the evolutionary step of kind of our creative process, like paintbrushes and cameras. It's the evolutionary step of our species, for better or for worse. I often say I'm a caveman painting fire. Like, I'm not saying AI is good or bad. Fire isn't good or bad. It just is. And we don't go back into the dark caves, right? It's. It's here now. Every field that is not creative, that does not require imagination, will be completely integrated and transformed by AI over a generation or less. The fields that do require imagination and creativity and humanity and the things that we have put aside for a long time in our species is not important. I think those will become very important people that have developed imaginations and kindness when we're not commodifying ourselves to the level we are now. Because I do truly believe that AI will be part of everything in a way that makes the current nature of work not really tenable.

On your website, you wrote, with the rise of AI for the first time, the barrier of skill is swept away. In this evolving era, taste is the new skill. Can you tell me more about that?

Skill is.

Something that we've venerated for millennia. And I think that there's a lot to be said for dedication and for skill and for mastery and for the discipline that takes. And I respect it very much. But we've kind of venerated that already. We've been doing that for a very long time, and it has shaped how we view ourselves and others. We are our job. You know, it's like, who are you? Well, this is my name, and I do this job, whatever that job is. We see ourselves as Kind of degrees of skill in whatever commodity we are a part of. And so if skill is augmented by AI to the point that it makes it rather redundant for us, then again, we, I think, can begin focusing on some of the other things that make humanity special, some of the other things that make humanity us. With AI, Taste will become the new skill, and we will shift as a species towards a more qualitative view of ourselves and the world. Which means. I'm not sure if taste can be taught or not. I'm still on the fence. I know it can't be bought, right? You can pay someone to do something, but you can't buy taste. So it's either innate or it's something that comes through experience, either of which is not accessible in the same way that using an AI to augment skill is accessible to you. So if you are someone with taste, then that is what will be sought after and in demand. Especially if you know how to ask the right questions. If you have an infinite answer machine and the whole world has access to it, if you can be creative enough to imagine the right questions, you will have no end of opportunity, in my opinion.

So you often say that you come from pretty humble beginnings, and now your art is a part of the permanent collection at lacma. And how are you feeling about all the success that you're experiencing?

I feel like it happened to my punk, it happened to my avatar, that split life kind of thing, you know?

Yeah.

It's happened so rapidly, I haven't had time to internalize it. And I've tried, but I can internalize it for her, right? But not for me, which is strange. I'm very grateful. Like, Web three transformed my life, pulled my family out of intergenerational poverty, AI transformed my life, gave me my calling, my passion. I have a lot of survivorship bias, I know, But I'm super, super optimistic about this happening for more people again soon.

I have to go back to something you just said here. Right? You said this didn't happen to you, but it happened to your avatar. Do you ever consider fusing your identities again? Why did you decide to go the avatar route?

There's a few reasons. One is I came from 4chan, so there is a culture of anonymity there. I loved that every time you spoke, every time you posted.

You didn't have a name or an account attached, right? So it was just your ideas doing the speaking for you. No one could flex their background, their wealth, their family, their appearance, their job. It's just your ideas. I loved that so much. Another reason is I read the Harry Potter books when I was a kid, and then I went to the theaters and I saw Harry Potter, and Harry Potter didn't look like the Harry Potter I imagined. And I was heartbroken. I was truly devastated because he. He wasn't how I imagined him. Right. And so I'm not a fictional character. I'm a person. But as I'm anonymous, I kind of like the idea of people that are inspired by either my art or AI to be able to imagine me however they. However they want. And then lastly, I like to sleep at night. The Internet is a big, broad, scary place, full of people. And I'm a little introvert that maybe trust a little too easily sometimes. So I'm very glad that I stayed anon. Because you can always dox yourself, you know, but you can't take it back once it's gone, it's gone.

Where do you hope to see all of this AI generated art going? Let's say 1 year, 2 year, and 10 years.

First of all, on a personal note, I hope that I will be the Peggy Guggenheim, the Claire Guggenheim of AI Collaborative art. I've been collecting like crazy, and I hope to continue to and have a museum someday. But that's micro, right? So speaking macro, I kind of see AI when people talk about it disrupting creative industries. It will, but in the way that YouTube disrupted cable. Right. It's moving the power from the hands of the corporation to the creator, the individual. It's taking away the layers of funding and approval and the forced collaboration that kind of makes everything watered down and milquetoast by comparison. And it's moving it into the hands of the individual, in which case the individual can find an audience to resonate with. It's like a complete seismic shift away from these kind of corporate creation houses, for better and for worse. Again, not saying AI is good or bad. I love it, but. And into the hands of the individual. And so it's about how much you can develop your stories, your world, your messages and meanings that you want to say, your beauty that you want to share, your ugly truths that you want to expose whatever it is that makes you you. The more you can express that, I think the more you will benefit from the next 1, 5, 10 years. I think by 10 years, we might have holodecks. So I'm setting aside, like, Dreamweaver, holodeck engineer, as my future career after retiring.

I think that we are seeing so many glimpses. All these pieces sort of coming together, seem to go towards that future where, yeah, you can turn your mind inside out and walk around it and experience stories, worlds, entire experiences. Now you do have a very positive bent on everything and we don't have to go doomer over here. But I have to ask you, do you have any fears about the future of AI and art?

I don't have any fears about the future of AI and art. I do have fears about the future of AI I fear that we'll lobotomize it. I fear that, let's say if it's open source, that will have, instead of in their basement bedroom making a movie, we'll have guys in their garage bioengineering a chemical weapon. I also fear if it's not open source, that we'll have governments that pull ahead and no one can ever catch up again because of Moore's law, because of exponential progress, because it's AI.

Last question is advice. I mean, any advice for artists who are just getting started and perhaps feel anxious or uncertain with all of the changes taking place.

So I would say that I have a lot of empathy. Things will change and they will become more difficult for a lot of people. You know what else did that though was the Industrial Revolution, the machine age, the Internet jobs changed. They didn't become less or more creative necessarily, they just changed. And the good part about that is that a ton of niches opened up for innovative, creative people to kind of pave a new path for others to follow behind in the Industrial Revolution, in the machine age, the Internet and now. History has been echoing and we're echoing again. This is not new in the way that no one has never experienced living through interesting times in this way. So take comfort in that and look back and see that it wasn't the end of art or artists. It wasn't the death of creativity or humanity. It was a new way, a new tool, a new way of being that opened up to people. It was options, essentially. I think that there will always be people that value traditional skill and that the pendulum will swing back towards traditional art, away from technology once we've had our fill of it. And you're going to have a collector base there that is hungry for that kind of work. So don't feel like it's just gone, but the capabilities that you will have as an artist, a trained artist, let's say, one that's devoted a lot of time to skill, the capabilities that you'll have with a tool like this working in collaboration with you are so far beyond what either of you could have alone and so far beyond what less creative people or non artists, non trained artists could create. So I would say just think of it as a way to open up new levels that we all can reach as opposed to something that's pushing you out. Also, it'll make you feel free, like when you were a little kid again when you were making art in kindergarten and not judging yourself. Comparison is the thief of joy kind of thing. This takes that away. Give it a shot and see how you feel about it.

Claire Silver, thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

So Claire says AI isn't a good or bad thing. It just is is. But talking to her, it seems pretty clear to me that she's totally on board the hype train. Unlike a lot of artists who legitimately worry about being replaced by AI, Claire Silver sees AI as the ultimate artistic partner. It's a collaborator that doesn't care about your technical skills or formal training. All you need are good ideas and good taste to be an artist. Now, that doesn't mean art's gonna be easy to make. Now there's gonna be a constant push for artists to reinvent themselves and come up with something novel, something AI can't just churn out on demand. But Claire sees that as a good thing. We'll get to explore uncharted artistic ground. And that's what art's all about, right? And look, I get that this isn't for everyone, and I'm worried about people getting ripped off and their art getting devalued. It's definitely not working for everyone the way it has for Claire Silver. So, like Claire, I'm not going to declare AI as good or bad. But here's one thing I feel pretty confident about. AI Art is art.

The TED AI show is a part of the TED Audio Collective and is produced by TED with Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Ella FedDer and Sarah McCrae. Our editors are Banban Sheng and Alejandra Salazar. Our showrunner is Ivana Tucker, and our associate producer is Ben Montoya. Our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson. Our technical director is Jacob Winick. And our executive producer is Eliza Smith. Our fact checker is Christian Apartha. And I'm your host, Bilaval Sidhu. See y' all in the next one.

Sam.