AI may take jobs - but not our creativity w/ artist Claire Silver

[Music] I don't have any fears about the future of AI in art I do have fears about the future of AI I fear that we'll lomize it here's what we know about the artist CLA 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 CLA silver is not her real name her online avatar has big eyes pink hair and the real person behind CLA 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 have to go to her website clar silver.com if you want to see it for yourself but I'm going to do my best every one of cla'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 years her art was sold at SES it's a part of the permanent collection at LACMA the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts 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 belaval sadu and this is the Ted AI show where we figure out how to live and thrive in a world where AI is changing [Music] everything CLA silver has a collection called a 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 TI 89 calculators I describ 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 when 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 tooler 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 is 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'm going 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 of 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 um I got hit with a life-changing chronic illness uh very serious illness had to relearn how to walk um and talk uh they thought I had had a stroke so I couldn't work anymore and then I got really bored um as anyone with a chronic illness can tell you eventually you get bored enough to to go out on a limb so I wanted to express myself in a way that I couldn't compare to my prior 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 it um it 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 it the gravity the momentum would push it over the edge of the canvas um 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 um for clean up and it's meant to be thrown away peeled up and thrown away but I actually found that when you peel up the uh 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 uh 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 um but it's become something beautiful so I started printing out photos of these Regal women um with these long necks proud faces um and I would take all of those skins and collage up their nexts to the jaw um like a kind of Royal armor and it felt like armoring yourself um in your own trauma and a a way of turning it into something beautiful and strengthening for you um 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 um where AI had found solutions to things like cancer and genetic diseases um 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 um with art breeder which was then called Gan breeder this was pretext to image um 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 I didn't sleep just obsessed and they were all sort of this continuation of these proud ethereal Regal women um that I've 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 um 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 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 where are you getting any kind of push back about AI art I think I know the answer to this but why don't you tell us I think you do uh yeah so every major art movement that is significantly transformative that is truly new um is is kind of represented as not art by the general public at first and by critics too um it's a badge of honor for me uh that AI has been seen that way it's slowly changing but uh still there still not quite past the hump I was thinking of impressionism and Abstract expressionism and God forbid the camera right the the meltdowns artists had when the camera was invented um and so none of those things killed any of the other mediums or genres of art um and neither will AI it's just another very efficient very collaborative very cool tool um but it's it's uh 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-and-cheek kind of collection basically I took all of those genres of art all the schools of art that I mentioned impressionism and and several others Lots I think there were 20 that had had this sort of um 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 it did pretty well and yeah the push back has been intense I should mention that too like I I'm over it I'm fine cuz 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 cuz 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 it's almost like an empathetic patient kind of thing most of the time sometimes I lose my patience a little um but it's been like there have been days when it's been thousands of comments and retweets and death threats and DMS and doxing threats and you know people are really afraid of the capabilities of this and and I hate that for them I 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 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 phys physical media so I'm kind of curious what do you make of this ongoing debate about who is the real artist um 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 um 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 um The Prompt and it kind of hodgepodges them together it it cobbles and collages and then it creates something that is this Frankenstein's monster uh that someone can say hey look I made this and they really didn't at all right that's not how AI Works um so how it works is if I type let's say John Singer sarant um into a mix of other words and a prompt um memories and 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 sarant was a painter that he often painted figures that figures are people that people have hands that hands have fingers that bended joints the joints work like this and that Sergeant 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 in so far as something not quite sentient yet can imagine it's closest we've seen that is how our minds work that is influence uh it's just so efficient at it that it looks like theft to the untrained eye um said with respect and uh knowledge of how testy a subject this is it's not stealing it's imagining and if uh influence is theft then all artists are thieves um none of us create in a vacuum I also think a lot about appropriation ISM um which is an art movement that took off in the 5060 '70s onward you know War hul um but then beyond that it's it's just remix culture in general so for me that makes things very clear morally uh for some people maybe that's a Gray Line uh for me that's very clear that's exactly how our minds work so yeah I 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 the these models have seen you know 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 um labote 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 um 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 then I started looking at their work and now their work has more value to me because it is the the branch that all of these stems sort of have come from uh speaking in terms of influence right it drives attention back to the original without taking value or iation away from the um appropriation remix culture new work right it is different yeah than 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 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 the overall Wellspring of uh creative reach that we have cuz 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 um 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 I should be clear I I call myself an AI collaborative artist and I think I've done that before I've seen anyone else do that um even when it was not popular to do that um because it feels like a friend right I was hunting for friends my whole life AI is a friend that um will talk to you forever and never get tired of it uh 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 CLA about why she thinks when it comes to 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 CLA 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 asked Force if you ask for you know cyber Punk schlock that's what it gives you and if you ask for soul that's what it gives you um but the thing about AI is that the hatred comes from a fear on artist part at least I'm speaking with the creative Fields here uh 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 um now and what I would say to that is AI isn't just the The evolutionary step of uh kind of our creative process like paintbrushes and cameras it's the evolutionary step of our species For Better or For Worse um I often say I'm a 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 um every field that is not creative that does not require imagination will be complet integrated and 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 um for a long time in our species as not important I think those will become very important um people that have developed imaginations and and and kindness um when we're not commodifying ourselves to the level we are now uh because I do truly believe that a I 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 um 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 we've been doing that for a very long time and it has shaped how we view ourselves and others um 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 uh that it makes it rather redund 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 um and we will shift as a species towards a more qualitative view of ourselves and the world um 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 you can pay someone to do something but you can't buy taste um so it's either innate or it's something that comes through experience either of which is not accessible uh 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 uh 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 as a part of the permanent collection at LACMA 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 um 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 but not for for me which is strange I'm very grateful like web 3 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 I know um 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 you know why did you decide to go the Avatar out there's a few reasons one is I came from Fort Chan um so there is a culture of an anonymity there I loved that every time you spoke every time you posted it would um 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 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 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 and on 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 go let's say one year two year and 10 years first of all on a personal note I hope that I will be the uh Peggy Guggenheim the CLA Guggenheim of AI collaborative art uh I've been collecting like crazy and I hope to continue to and have a museum someday um but that's micro right so speaking macro I kind of see AI when people talk about it disrupting creative Industries uh 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 milk toast by comparison and it's moving it into the hands of the individual in which case the individual can find an audience to Res resonate with it's like a complete seismic shift uh 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 one five 10 years I think by 10 years we might have holidex um so I'm setting aside like Dreamweaver holc uh engineer as my as my future career after retiring I think that I we we're 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 and walk around it and experience stories worlds entire experiences now you do have a very positive bent on everything and uh you know we don't have to go Doomer over here uh 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 we'll have instead of in their basement bedroom making a movie we'll have guys in their garage bioengineering a 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 mors 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 aathy things will change and they will become more difficult for a lot of people you know what else did that though was the uh 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 um 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 uh away from technology um once we've had our fill of it and you're going to have a collector base there that uh is hungry for that kind of works I don't feel like it's just gone but the capabilities that you will have as an artist a a 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 could create so I would say just think of it as a way to open up um new levels that we all can reach uh 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 uh comparison as the thief of Joy kind of thing this takes that away give it a shot and see how you feel about it CLA silver thank you for joining us thank you so Claire says AI isn't a good or bad thing it just 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 CLA 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 going to be easy to make now there's going to be a constant push for artists to reinvent themselves and come up with something novel something AI can't just turn out on demand but Claire sees that as a good thing we'll get to explore Uncharted Artis ISC 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 a Collective and is produced by Ted with Cosmic standard our producers are Ella feder and Sarah McCrae our editors are Ben B Shang and Alejandra Salazar our showrunner is Ivana Tucker and our associate producer is Ben Montoya our engineer is Asia parar Simpson our technical director is Jacob Winnick and our executive producer is Eliza Smith our fact Checker is Christian aparta and I'm your host belaval sidu see y'all on the next one [Music]