Art vs. AI: The Salon

What this episode covers

Throughout the course of this series, we’ve looked at how AI has been slowly, and then, very quickly, infiltrating and influencing various industries, but there’s one space where its role feels particularly complicated - the art world. We think of art as coming from a place deep inside us that is us at our most human. But what happens when art is made by computers? Is it even art making to pull the idea of art from infinite datasets and create the closest approximation? Or is that, in its own way, a whole new kind of creativity? And what does this mean for creative industries as we know them? To dive into these questions, we’re doing something a little different today. In the grand artistic tradition, we’ve assembled a small salon of thinkers - professor and author Kate Crawford, journalist and writer Hari Kunzru, playwright and performer Annie Dorsen, and art historian and audio producer Tamar Avishai - for a sprawling, searching conversation about AI art is for, what it’s responding to, how artists are both pushing back against it and embracing it, and whether or not this moment in art, AI, technology, and popular culture is unique.

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