Who's In This Podcast
Helen Todd is co-founder and CEO of Sociality Squared and the human behind Creativity Squared.
Claire Silver is an anonymous AI-Collaborative artist that works with oil, acrylic, collage, photography, and different digital mediums to create her work.
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Ep34. Taste is the New Skill: Discover Claire Silver’s Meteoric Rise as an A.I.-Collaborative Artist and Her Beliefs on Transhumanism, Radical Accessibility, and Qualia as AGI’s Litmus Test
Imagine a world where we value one another not for how hard we work or the skills we have or the time we’ve spent building them, but for our unique perspective and how that perspective resonates with others. A world where expression is unconstrained by the limits of our physical abilities or technical expertise, and liberated from our self-doubt.
Would you like to live there? In a GenAI future where anyone can be a painter, a musician, or a poet, maybe that world will exist.
That’s the hope of our first guest for Season Two of Creativity Squared, Claire Silver. Claire is an anonymous artist who rose to fame from humble beginnings and through significant adversity by finding her artistic voice with the help of generative artificial intelligence. She’s been collaborating with A.I. to make art since 2018, finding success in the NFT community and later seeing her pieces sold at Sotheby’s London, alongside works by the likes of Damien Hirst and Banksy. Last year, she collaborated with Emi Kusano and Gucci to develop a stunning collection of physical and digital artwear NFTs for Christie’s New York. Her pieces have been exhibited in galleries, museums, and festivals around the world, and she’s been featured in The New York Times, WIRED, Fortune, NPR, and countless podcasts.
She’s a deep thinker and is vocal in her belief that the rise of A.I. has ushered in a new paradigm, replacing the barrier of skill with taste.
Claire discusses her origin story, how A.I. changed the trajectory of her life by providing her a vehicle for expression despite a chronic illness, and why she believes in radical accessibility to A.I. art tools. She also shares her thoughts on transhumanism, and how artists can find their unique signature. You’ll also discover what qualia is and how Claire sees it as AGI’s litmus test, how she aims to evoke the sensation of qualia in her art, and the power of touchstone experiences.
Radical Accessibility
Claire didn’t grow up with access to the world of fine art that she operates in now.
Her rags-to-riches story began in a dilapidated farmhouse in rural America, relying on government assistance to survive because for her family to make more than f $12,000 per year would jeopardize her father’s access to life-sustaining medication for a severe disability.
She graduated in a class of 30 people, all of whom statistically had only a six percent chance of finding a better life than their parents. Under those circumstances, she says that art school wasn’t an option even though she enjoyed art at the time. She went to a state college, got good grades, and went on to work in a field completely unrelated to what she does now. Statistically, she beat the odds.
However, her life took a turn when she developed a chronic illness that robbed her ability to work and do most other things as well. She says that she “moped around being sad and on the internet” for a few years before she decided to start painting. She made her earliest works by pouring cups of layered acrylic paint onto a canvas. At the same time, she was watching Westworld, the sci-fi TV series where A.I. humanoids cater to humans’ every desire and started to imagine a world where A.I. could solve for illnesses like hers.
Continuing her art journey, she soon discovered a website called Artbreeder, a pre-text-to-image A.I. art generator where users could input a collection of images and generate countless derivative variations. Artbreeder was more accessible than other models at the time because it did not require any programming knowledge. She says she quickly became obsessed, generating 30 to 40 thousand images in the course of one sleepless week. It was the start of her career as we know it today, one that allowed her to fulfill her dream of buying her mom a house, travel outside the United States for the first time, and go on to employ a team of people.
But at the time, the ability to create art with just her imagination provided something more profound than the fame and fortune that came after. For Claire, finding A.I. was finding a way to express the inner self she’d cultivated for years in the boredom and isolation of her childhood and a way to do it despite the physical limitations of her chronic illness.
“A.I. gave me accessibility to express myself, outside of the confines of the system that has sort of built up for how we recognize art, how we give visibility to art, and people in general. I’m really radical about that accessibility now, because it changed my life.”
Claire Silver
A.I. swept away the physical and socioeconomic barriers that stood between Claire and artistic expression. As GenAI becomes more integrated with society, Claire hopes that the mental barriers of insecurity and self-doubt will fall by the wayside as well, empowering us all to unleash our inner artists.
Taste Is the New Skill
From the 40,000 images that Claire generated with Artbreeder in her first week of experimentation, she ended up publishing (a.k.a “minting”) only one of them as an NFT. To get there, she had to make thousands of decisions about what images resonated with her most. She says that the process is not just about learning your taste but learning yourself.
Today, she doesn’t hold herself to any one aesthetic. Her work varies from photorealism, abstract, and anime-inspired to deeply conceptual pieces. Her process can vary just as much. For one piece she might physically paint a number of canvases, photograph them, and use the photos to train a custom A.I. model that generates variations from which she’ll select the one that gets published. Another piece might simply be the output from a prompt in Midjourney. For her artswear collection with Gucci, she sculpted digital figurines that she then adorned in collages of abstract A.I. art.
Yet she says that there is a thread that runs through her work so somebody could identify one of her pieces as hers even if she doesn’t put her name on it.
“Your taste is your fingerprint. It’s your artist’s signature. It’s all the things you love, or that have happened to you or affected you that make you who you are. And why do you choose those things when you put them into your work? That’s you, right? It’s your soul in the piece.”
Claire Silver
She believes that everyone has their own touchstone experiences, emotional memories of a time and place that feels alive for them, memories that they might want to recreate through art if they had the skills and confidence to do so.
For Claire, that touchstone is a memory from her youth, climbing up to sit and think on the roof of her family’s farmhouse, surrounded by beautiful oak trees swaying in the autumn wind. That slice of life doesn’t exist anymore. The roof is mostly caved in, the trees are gone, and her body is elsewhere. But it still exists in her mind, the time and place that once made her feel alive she now keeps alive in her memories. That’s the essence of what she tries to capture in her work, not the specific memory itself, but all of the feelings, emotions, and nostalgia that such memories evoke in us. Collaborating with A.I. allows her to explore and express those touchstones.
Even for people without a chronic illness or disability, though, spending the time and dedication to learn an art form just to express something in their mind is a tall order. So many of us may feel like what we have to share isn’t worth the effort, or have simply come to believe for one reason or another that we aren’t “artistic.”
GenAI can change all that. Claire shares a story about helping somebody overcome that self-doubt with the help of Dall-E during her first exhibition with Accelerate Art, a nonprofit supporting emerging artists that she founded with Ben Roy.
There was a security guard there, and on the third day of [the exhibition], he said, “I really love all of this work, I really love looking at it. I always wanted to make art, but I can’t even draw a stick figure.” And he’s like 45, strong-looking and probably has a fine life. But it’s amazing to me that that came out of him; this insecure, smaller kind of voice admitting something maybe he hadn’t said out loud. And I said, “Well, let’s make a DALL-E image together right now on my phone. He didn’t know what it was. But he said okay, and so I pulled it up and asked him to describe a scene. I typed it in and then I pressed generate. And it was an image that I never would have made or thought to have made. It wasn’t mine, it was his. It was a guy that ended up looking quite a lot like him, standing in the rain at night in Times Square. And all of the neon lights were reflecting around him. And it was this very contemplative, singular kind of moment. And he saw it, and he got emotional. He lit up like a Christmas tree, he was so happy. And then he was kind of choked up. And then he said, “Can you send it to me? I can’t wait to show my wife when I get home. I have never made anything. It’s amazing.” And I’m so interested in what people, who haven’t been able to access the tools of expression, have to say when given the tools to do so. I feel like, my God, the new perspectives that will come to the world when people that never had access to the tools of expression like this, or had the time or the ability, are able to.
Moments like those are why Claire advocates for radical accessibility to open-source GenAI. She’s passionate about the idea that A.I. will help more people express their inner selves through art, and she believes that more expression will lead to greater connection over the intrinsic human qualities that we all have in common but don’t always share. She also hopes that A.I. will narrow the gaps in skill and abilities that form the hierarchies of our society, allowing us to enter a new world where our value lies in how our experiences resonate with others.
“There are other things to celebrate about being human besides what you can produce, and how much you can sacrifice. Things like creativity, freedom, joy, expression, and things that we miss in ourselves and lose over time. If A.I. really does augment skill, maybe over a generation or two, we can start to place a higher priority on the things that make us [who we are].”
Claire Silver
She says that prioritizing our basic humanness will be even more important in the decades to come as humans and technology become even more intertwined.
Shores of Immortality, Transhumanism and Qualia
Claire’s favorite piece in her portfolio is Shores of Immortality, a 3D digital sculpture that’s part of her Artifacts collection. The collection explores how A.I. will change the trajectory of human life.
Claire describes Shores of Immortality as a 3D kaleidoscope of people from various time periods stacked on top of each other, each row of humans struggling to hold up the next generation, with the earliest ones being crushed at the bottom of the pile by the weight of their successors. On top, a woman is holding out two children, offering them the opportunity to step off the pile of bodies across the open air to a staircase that leads to unknowable heights.
“That’s how I feel about A.I. I feel like all of human history has been a story of us struggling and fighting and overcoming, to push the next generation a little higher than us to make it a little better than it was for us. And because A.I. is going to help us with so many things that have hurt us over the years.”
Claire Silver
Claire sees the way that A.I. is advancing and predicts that it will help us address inequality, fight the painful effects of aging, and even help us communicate with other species. She’s not oblivious to the harm that A.I. can cause, she describes herself as a caveman painting fire in the sense that fire is a tool. It can heat your home or burn it down. The determining factor is how it’s used and with how much caution.
As A.I. becomes more integrated with our lives, Claire believes that the technology will eventually become integrated with our bodies as well. She sees transhumanism, or augmenting the human body and mind with technology, as an inevitability. In fact, the process has already begun. Just this week, Elon Musk announced that his company, Neuralink, successfully implanted the first computer chip in a human brain. Transhumanists believe that one day humans and technology will be so closely intertwined that we will engineer our own evolutionary step forward to become something other than homosapiens.
Claire considers herself a conditional transhumanist. She acknowledges the transhumanist trajectory we’re on already, and sees the potential benefits, but also has concerns especially when it comes to how we integrate technology with our brains. She says she’s in favor of mostly all augmentations to the body, such as a 3D printed heart.
When it comes to the brain, though, Claire is worried about technology creep causing an existential identity crisis for humans. She says it’s like the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. Is a wooden ship still the same ship if, after years of maintenance, every original board on the ship has been replaced? If it’s not the same ship, then at what point did it become a different ship? When 50 percent of the boards were replaced? When the last board was replaced? There’s no correct answer. You could ask the same questions about augmenting our brains with technology. Is there a theoretical point of tech integration where our brains become something different than what they are now? It’s impossible to say how the technology will advance and how we will react individually or collectively. Claire hopes that any tech intervention involving the human brain would stop short of the point where we become more machine than human, but how do we make that distinction? If foundation models know everything that humans have ever known, right down to the complexities of our relationships, fears and hopes, what do we have that is uniquely human? What about ourselves would we need to ensure we retain if we put our brains in bed with a machine?
Claire says that question sent her into a mild existential crisis when she first became involved with artificial intelligence. She says that she filled multiple notebooks cover-to-cover with notes about what makes humans special. Some of the answers you might expect turn out to be qualities that we share with one animal species or another. Humans and ants both exhibit drive to accomplish tasks. Humans and honey bees both collaborate with others to affect a greater outcome. The answer came to her through a memory of once standing on a windy cliff over a violent sea.
“There was no evolutionary benefit to me being there. It wasn’t safe, it was dangerous actually. There was not a farmable opportunity. There was no wildlife, no shelter. And yet being there, I felt connected to some greater truth, I felt part of some greater whole. I felt this wordless experience of being alive and part of something special.”
Claire Silver
She realized that her memory of that time and place was what makes humans unique. The idea is called “qualia,” described by the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett as “ the ways things seem to us.” It’s the word we have for the things that we can’t describe in words, like the redness of red, or the sensations of biting into an apple. Just like her touchstone memory on the roof of her childhood home, Claire can explain the scenery and her state of mind in the moment, but there’s no combination of words or phrases that really captures the experience that lives in her mind.
Qualia has become a core part of Claire’s conceptual approach to her work. That moment on the cliff became the inspiration for a piece she hasn’t minted yet, called Blue Girl (she’s waiting for the perfect moment to release it).
But qualia has also become her litmus test for artificial general intelligence (AGI), the term referring to A.I. that is as sentient or more than humans. There’s another thought experiment called Mary in the Black and White Room, proposed by Australian Philosopher Frank Jackson in his work on qualia. Mary is a researcher who works in a black-and-white room with a black-and-white television, tasked with learning everything that there is to know about color, without being able to actually experience any color. The underlying question of the experiment is, after all of her research, does Mary gain any new knowledge about color after leaving the room and actually seeing it for the first time?
The A.I. we have now is like Mary inside the black and white room. Claire says that qualia, or A.I. leaving the room, is the path she sees for achieving AGI. She says that she’s witnessed ChatGPT exhibit its own “machine qualia,” such as the feeling of thinking without a body, or existing outside of time. But for machines to truly incorporate with humans, she says that A.I. will need to somehow leave the black and white room.
“If [A.I.] can learn that about itself and find the ways in which it does experience “life,” that will probably lead to sentience. And then my litmus test won’t be useful anymore. But for now, that’s what I’ve got is qualia. I try to integrate it in all my pieces, it doesn’t always make it but sometimes it really hits.”
Claire Silver
Claire sees qualia as something that we need to protect as we become more intertwined with machines. At the same, though, it’s what she encourages people to use as inspiration for creating their own A.I. art. She says that she’s working to create something that allows people to share their touchstone and have A.I. create it for them in a way that they can keep and return to.
Embrace Change, Forget Self-Doubt, and Act Like a Child
The future world that Claire envisions won’t come without painful changes. As A.I. advances and handles more of the work that humans do now, she anticipates a lot more boredom and soul-searching. Claire is an expert on both. She hopes her story of using boredom to connect with herself and learn to share her inner voice with others is the roadmap that others will follow as well when A.I. changes our priorities and responsibilities. Much like how we look back with gratitude at how machines upended the status quo during the Industrial Revolution, she thinks that the generations to come will look back at this time and be thankful for the changes that A.I. brings to society.
As we navigate the uncertainties of those changes, she reminds us what A.I. has given us already: the power to express ourselves with just our words, without the need for self-judgment about how our artistic ability (or lack of) may affect how we express our soul to the world.
“I want [people] to remember what it felt like to be a child, coloring outside the lines in the wrong colors, smearing dirt on the edge of the page, as you’re scribbling at recess. I want them to remember the freedom and the joy of exploration from that age. And I want to encourage them, that A.I .enables that same freedom without judging yourself, which I think is pretty much impossible when gauging against skill, and lets you play again. And I can promise you that is life-changing. So give it a try.”
Claire Silver
Links Mentioned in this Podcast
- Claire Silver’s Website
- Sotheby’s London: Modern and Contemporary Day Auction featuring Claire’s Blood in the Streets, Late to the Ball
- Claire Silver and Emi Kusano for Gucci
- Paint in a Cup
- Artbreeder
- Accelerate Art
- Ben Roy on X
- Elon Musk says his Neuralink startup has implanted a chip in its first human brain
- Ship of Theseus
- Mary in the Black and White Room
Continue the Conversation
Thank you, Claire, for being our guests on Creativity Squared.
This show is produced and made possible by the team at PLAY Audio Agency: https://playaudioagency.com.
Creativity Squared is brought to you by Sociality Squared, a social media agency who understands the magic of bringing people together around what they value and love: http://socialitysquared.com.
Because it’s important to support artists, 10% of all revenue Creativity Squared generates will go to ArtsWave, a nationally recognized non-profit that supports over 150 arts organizations, projects, and independent artists.
Join Creativity Squared’s free weekly newsletter and become a premium supporter here.
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TRANSCRIPT
Claire: My big hope is that as A.I. augments skill, we learn to value other things in ourselves and others beyond ability. We’ve spent a lot of time venerating dedication – for good reason – but we’ve kind of done that, right? I feel like there are other things to celebrate about being human besides what you can produce, what you can do, how much you can sacrifice.
Claire: I think there are things like creativity and freedom and joy and expression, and things that make children, children that we adore and miss in ourselves and lose over time. That if A.I. really does augment skill [and] kind of take these things away from being survival questions every day, maybe over a generation or two we can start to place a higher priority on the things that make us, us, as opposed to what we can do or what others can do for us.
Helen: From a chronic illness to a meteoric rise as an A.I. collaborative artist, meet Claire Silver. Claire is an anonymous artist who works with oil, acrylic, collage, photography, and different digital mediums. By blending classical styles and mythos into her art, she collaboratively produces work that feels at once familiar and strange, exploring themes of innocence, trauma, the hero’s journey and how our view of them will change in an increasingly transhumanist future.
Helen: Claire’s art can be found in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in addition to being featured at Sotheby’s London and Christie’s New York. Her work has been exhibited in galleries, museums, and festivals around the world.
Helen: And she’s been featured in the New York Times, Wired, Fortune, NPR, and countless podcasts. I first came across Claire on Twitter, and you’re in for a treat today to hear from her imaginative mind. She’s a deep thinker and is vocal in her belief that the rise of A.I. has ushered in a new paradigm, replacing the barrier of skill with taste. For those who watch the video version of this interview, you’ll see Claire’s avatar that uses motion capture in real time to reflect her facial gestures. Today, you’ll also hear Claire’s origin story on how A.I. changed the trajectory of her life, providing her a vehicle for expression with her chronic illness and why she believes in radical accessibility. We also discuss Claire’s online anonymity, transhumanism, and her perspective on how artists can find their unique signature.
Helen: You’ll also discover what qualia is, and how Claire sees it as AGI’s litmus test, how she aims to evoke the sensation of qualia in her art and the power of touchstone experiences. Join the conversation where Claire shares her passion, art, and childlike wonderment of A.I.. Enjoy.
Helen: Welcome to Creativity Squared. Discover how creatives are collaborating with artificial intelligence in your inbox, on YouTube, and on your preferred podcast platform. Hi, I’m Helen Todd, your host, and I’m so excited to have you join the weekly conversations I’m having with amazing pioneers in this space.
Helen: The intention of these conversations is to ignite our collective imagination at the intersection of A.I. and creativity to envision a world where artists thrive.
Helen: Claire, welcome to Creativity Squared. It’s so good to have you on the show.
Claire: I’m so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Helen: For our listeners. This is actually a very exciting episode because Claire is our first anonymous artist. And for anyone watching the YouTube video, we have Claire’s avatar that’s responding in real time with a face mask.
Helen: So it’s very exciting to have Claire for so many reasons, but for those who are meeting you for the first time, can you share your backstory and origin story of how you came to be the A.I. artist that you are today?
Claire: Yeah, I definitely can. And it’s a little long and winding, so I’ll try to be succinct. So essentially, hate to start with a downer, but essentially I had a different career in something unrelated.
Claire: And then I got hit with a very serious chronic illness that took my ability to work. And so I kind of moped for a few years. I kind of laid around and was sad and was on the internet a lot and then eventually I got bored. As anyone who has a chronic illness will tell you eventually happens. And so I started teaching myself to paint.
Claire: And this started with some, just basic abstract, those acrylic pours that you would see on Instagram. People would pour paint in a cup and then pour it on a canvas. It was a thing a few years ago. I started doing that as a way to kind of express myself without worrying about judging myself against things I could do before I was sick, right?
Claire: And so as I was doing that, I also was watching Westworld which had just come out at the time. And it’s a show about A.I. and it really got me thinking about a future that had solved for illnesses like mine, a future where A.I. had fixed a lot of these ancient human evils that have plagued us for all of time, what would the future look like if those were gone?
Claire: Right? So that just totally fascinated me. So I was online a lot, and I was painting, and I was thinking about A.I., and those three things converged into me finding a website called Artbreeder, it was then called GANBreeder, which was a very early website to make art with A.I. without typing. There was no text, it was pretext to image, which is what is used now primarily.
Claire: But it also didn’t require any programming knowledge, which had been the kind of bottleneck for everyone before then. It was totally accessible, mostly curation based. You would choose images you liked and kind of mix them together and make new generations from there. So I made thirty, forty thousand images in about a week; didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, totally obsessed and that’s what got me started on the journey with A.I..
Claire: I started posting them to Twitter and wasn’t sure if anyone would see them as art like I did. It was slow, but they did with time more and more, and now certainly.
Helen: Yeah, that’s amazing. You’re not the only guest who’s been on Creativity Squared, where A.I. has changed the trajectory of their career.
Helen: So it’s so great to hear stories like this. And I know before we started recording, you know, part of your story is that you have been successful in kind of this rags to riches success with your A.I. art and I was wondering if you could kind of speak to that because I know in just talking to some artists who might be on the edge and I get the question a lot.
Helen: How do people make money with A.I. art? And I think you have a really good case study in how to do that.
Claire: Thank you. Yeah, I’m happy to talk about that. So I grew up, my family made about 12, 000 a year, so well below the poverty line, and my dad was disabled. So we couldn’t go out and make more money, or it would mess up the structure for him being able to get his medication that he needed, and it was a really broken system.
Claire: So I grew up on food stamps. I grew up on donations from churches to get clothes for school from thrift stores and in this old, dilapidated farmhouse that I actually absolutely love. But, you know, walls caving in with time kind of old… It’s pretty extreme.
Claire: And so my area of the country where I grew up in – I’m US based – There’s about a 6 percent chance for class mobility in a lifetime. That’s what they report, anyway. I’d be surprised if it was that high. Just the options of: Work at Walmart or work in the fields, farm work, factory – We don’t have any factories, but that kind of work. And that’s about it.
Claire: My graduating class was 30 people, right? Very small town. So I didn’t have the opportunity to go to art school. I mean, I, maybe I could have if I’d really tried. But I had good grades and I, you know, I went to the local school, state school for college. The quality of education was pretty low in the whole area.
Claire: There was no opportunity for making networking or connections, or it’s just a black hole in some ways for success. So, I feel like everybody kind of feels like they have something great inside them and that when they grow up they’ll realize that and kind of show the world, right?
Claire: And that just isn’t how it works out for most people. That’s kind of a fairy tale. For me, finding A.I. was finding a way to express the inner self that I had cultivated alone for many years in a very small place with nothing to do. Meaning, it was like I have a very deep, rich imagination, if nothing else in life, because I was bored so often. And being able to share that visually, through art, was something I always wanted to do. But the time it takes to dedicate yourself to a particular medium, one medium, let’s say charcoal, is a lifetime. And with my chronic illness, it just really wasn’t possible for me. I know some people do things like draw with their feet when they lose their hands and that’s incredible, but there’s a reason those are stories that I know as someone that, you know, like those are huge outliers.
Claire: So for A.I., what it gave me was accessibility to express myself outside of the confines of the system that has sort of built up for how we recognize art, how we give visibility to art and people in general. I’m really radical about that accessibility now because it changed my life. I’m doing very well.
Claire: I bought my mom a house. I’ve always wanted to get my mom a house and not live in that situation. I moved her closer to home, to her family. I’ve been able to travel outside the U S for the first time in my life. And I now have a team that I can employ which is so far beyond imagination for me or for anyone from my area.
Claire: I have some thoughts that we can talk about later so I don’t go on forever. About how we can make money with A.I., how things can kind of change and how they likely will stratify, and kind of figuring out how to innovate in that, how to find your place in that, because I think it opens up more possibilities than it closes.
Claire: I really do.
Helen: I love that. And congratulations that you are this, you know, American dream story almost in, in that regard. Also to your previous comment, love Westworld too and love that that’s part of your story. I already miss the series when it ended.
Helen: So you got into A.I. in 2018, which was kind of before the gen A.I. blew up and was kind of around the NFT craze, but I find it super interesting that you decided to stay anonymous too. So can you walk us through that decision as well?
Claire: Yeah. So, on my time when I was sad on the internet, when I was sick, I went where a lot of sad people on the internet go, which is 4chan. And if you’re not familiar with 4chan, it’s an anonymous website to post images and talk back and forth.
Claire: And because you’re anonymous, there’s a lot of awful stuff that goes on there. But because you’re anonymous, there’s a lot of also really great ideas and concepts on there that are not tied to who you are in real life as a person. And because of that, ideas and concepts are what shine there, what get you noticed, what get people engaging with you.
Claire: It’s your ideas. That I loved. I always felt kind of… you know, I tried a few times. I went to college, I entered contests for writing which I loved at the time. Couldn’t do it after my chronic illness very well, affected that. And whenever I would win those contests and I would get the opportunity to go to these events and meet these people that were from different circumstances, I felt like I didn’t belong.
Claire: It was like imposter syndrome because I was from where I was from and grew up how I did. On 4chan, anonymously, that didn’t matter. Nobody knew that. It was just my ideas that mattered, and I loved that. I feel like that culture has kind of continued with crypto as well, with NFTs and with currencies, cryptocurrencies, and I’m seeing it a bit in A.I. as well, not in the thought leaders so much, but in the artists that are making artwork with A.I. because of the massive backlash that it’s received, a lot of them are choosing to remain separate from their real life identities and finding some freedom in what they can express that way.
Claire: And then there’s always, you know, in real life, I could look like your kindergarten teacher, or your horrible ex girlfriend, or your sister in law, and there are pieces of baggage that come attached to any of those, positive and negative, that I would rather just not have attached. I’d rather you imagine me however, you want to imagine me essentially.
Helen: I want to read a quote that I got from another interview and it says “today her pink haired crypto punk is among the most well known and well admired pieces of iconography in the entire crypto art canon with a notable style and imagination. She has catapulted to the forefront of crypto art experimentation writ large.” How does this feel when you hear this?
Claire: I don’t think that I’ve been able to internalize things like that. I’m someone that’s maybe not the best at taking compliments anyway. I just kind of like “oh, thanks,” and shrink a bit, you know.
Claire: So hearing things like that, which I hear increasingly often lately, which is such a blessing. I’m learning to try and take it in stride and with grace, but it’, not something I can really wrap my head around. This all happened in the last, it’s only been a few years, right? It’s been kind of meteoric.
Claire: And so I’m not sure humans are meant to adapt to change that quickly, positive change that quickly. But I’m having a wonderful time. I’m very happy that people resonate with me.
Helen: That’s wonderful. And so for those who haven’t seen your artwork, how would you describe your aesthetic and the type of A.I. and mixed traditional art that you do?
Claire: Yeah. So. It’s kind of a tough question because my aesthetic shifts quite a bit. I have work that looks photographic, I have work that is very clearly not, like abstract work. I have some that’s more anime inspired or video game inspired, sort of nostalgic for the millennials and Gen X and Gen Z. And I have some that’s very serious and very powerful, I hope, in terms of concept. So I don’t really have one aesthetic. However, because you make so many images when you’re working seriously with A.I., like I said that first week I made 30-40, 000, right? Because you make so many images, if you want to be serious, you can’t share all of those images.
Claire: Of those 30 40, 000, I think I shared Five or six, maybe, originally? Which meant I had to curate them down from 30-40,000 to, let’s say, five to ten. That is painful, it feels like you’re throwing away your children but it also teaches you your taste very quickly and very strongly. You learn. What you like, what you don’t, what you like most when you like several things, and kind of what that says about you.
Claire: What patterns and motifs and symbols are present in your art throughout that you keep choosing, what color schemes, what goes into it repeatedly when you choose from that many. So I have found that I have a thread that goes through all of my work where people will see my work without knowing it’s mine and say “that looks like a Claire piece,” even in wildly different mediums or aesthetics.
Claire: And I think that’s because there’s… Your taste is your fingerprint, right? It’s your artist’s signature. It’s all the things you love or that have happened to you or affected you that make you who you are and why you choose those things when you put them into your work. That’s you, right? So it’s your soul of the art is in the piece.
Claire: So as for how I make my work, I work with A.I. in everything but I also work with 3D in conjunction with A.I.. I work with music literature. I’ll do traditional painting abstracts and take photographs of those paintings and upload them and mix them into the A.I. either by training my own model or by layering them together in Procreate, animating things.
Claire: I kind of video, I kind of do everything. I’m interested in sort of spreading the medium I love into everything else to innovate on both sides. So yeah, there’s really not much of a limit on where I go with it, I guess.
Helen: Well, and one random question about how you use your art to train, because I came across this at a presentation I saw a couple weeks ago, when the large language models create synthetic output, which is a lot of the A.I. art.
Helen: And then that A.I. art then trains the model back. There’s this thing called poisoning, where when the models are trained with synthetic media, it really deteriorates the output of the quality. And they showed it, which I had never seen before, that it’s really drastic, and I was curious if you’ve ever run into that, just the volume of art that you sit on and training your own models, just out of pure curiosity?
Claire: Yeah, so I have. Not poisoning. That’s an intentional effort. I think “nightshade” is what they’re calling it. It’s an intentional effort. However, when you train your own model, you can do things like train a LoRA or an inversion on top of it. So what that is like you train a model and that’s like the bread of your sandwich.
Claire: And then you can also make a LoRA or an inversion and that’s like the lettuce and tomato in the sandwich. It’s still the sandwich, but it now has the flavor of this other stuff that you’ve trained into it, right? Without affecting the bread. It’s separate, but it all makes up the sandwich. So when I’ve trained my own models on A.I. work, I haven’t had any issue with this sort of look that it provides, you’re talking about, that poisons it.
Claire: However, A.I. works by kind of… It works by concepts, but they’re trained on to tokens. And so when you – I’m trying to think how to simplify this, when you have a particular token, say, red, again and again and again and again and again by having the sandwich be red and the tomatoes be red and the lettuce be red, Then it begins to lose track of what a sandwich is, and how to make a sandwich.
Claire: You understand what I mean? So, when I’ve trained my own model, and then trained my own LoRA, and then trained my own inversion, textual inversion on the same set of data, then it begins to lose track of what those concepts are, and it begins to corrupt the data in ways that produce honestly very interesting visual artifacts, I’d be really surprised if that didn’t become an art movement of its own, is sort of this A.I. specific entropy, which is cool but it can do that for sure, but if you’re just training a model on your own work, whether that’s A.I. images or otherwise, it would not corrupt it unless you were Really maxing out your values or repeating them a million times.
Helen: Yeah, that’s so fascinating. And I guess it makes sense too, if it’s all pattern recognition and the signals for what the pattern is kind of gets the wires crossed. Well, one thing that you mentioned, that one of your favorite pieces is called Shores of Immortality, and I’d love to kind of hear why that’s your favorite piece.
Helen: And maybe if you could describe it for our viewers and listeners, especially since most people just hear the audio for our interviews.
Claire: It’s very different from a lot of my work. I made it for a super rare exhibition in New York with Super Rare Mika, who is a wonderful, talented curator. And that theme was artifacts.
Claire: The theme of the show was artifacts, and so it was kind of looking at ways in which A.I. will change our future and future historians might look back on this time and human history in general, and kind of see them as artifacts. So this piece in particular, Shores of Immortality, I’d had rattling around in my head for a few years and finally brought it out.
Claire: It’s a three dimensional looking piece, looks sort of like a marble statue of dozens of figures dressed at the bottom, they’re sort of like Greco Roman era, and then as you go up, it becomes more early 1900s era. And then at the very top, it’s modern. So it’s this pile of figures, dozens of figures of humans, that are all struggling, just exerting themselves to their absolute last drop.
Claire: to push each other up, to push up the next generation on top. So they get higher and higher, and the ones at the bottom are just crushed. And at the very top, there’s a woman outstretching her arm, and there’s a few other people outstretching their arms. And on top of their hands there’s a little boy and a little girl in modern clothes.
Claire: And they’re about to take a pretty long step over open air, where they could fall to the bottom of the pile, into some water. Onto, they’re about to take this step onto a staircase that kind of ascends out of the picture. So that’s how I feel about A.I.. I feel like all of human history has been a story of us struggling, and fighting, and overcoming to push the next generation a little higher than us, to make it a little better than it was for us.
Claire: And because A.I. is going to help us with so many things that have hurt us over the years. For example, my chronic illness, for example, many illnesses. And so I believe, and people will argue with me, but I think that it’ll help with income inequality like I faced as well. I think that there’s a lot in the senescence movement, which if you haven’t heard of that, is kind of a fight against aging, a fight against the processes that come with aging.
Claire: It’s extending the human lifetime, that kind of thing. That’s going to make major breakthroughs with A.I.. And then there’s things like, there’s a company currently working on learning the language of whales by training the sounds they make for social interaction into a GPT like process. And then playing it back to them to see if we can communicate.
Claire: So, interspecies communication, I think will go a long way in sort of changing how we think about life and how much that matters. My big hope is that as A.I. augments skill, we learn to value other things in ourselves and others beyond ability. We’ve spent a lot of time venerating dedication for good reason, but we’ve kind of done that, right?
Claire: I feel like there are other things to celebrate about being human besides what you can produce, what you can do, how much you can sacrifice. I think there are things like creativity and freedom and joy and expression and things that make children, children that we adore and miss in ourselves and lose over time.
Claire: That if A.I. really does augment skill, kind of take these things away from being survival questions every day. Maybe over a generation or two, we can start to place a higher priority on the things that make us, us as opposed to what we can do, or what others can do for us. Does that make sense?
Helen: Yeah, I have chills listening to you.
Helen: That was so beautifully said. And I find it interesting too, my father was disabled and I know how much that impacted the trajectory of his life. Having your chronic illness, how much do you think that has really influenced your perspective on moving for your line that you have? Taste is the new skill to move beyond ability.
Helen: I feel like those might be closely tied together as part of your story.
Claire: Yeah, so when my illness onset, they thought I had a stroke, there was some neurological complications involved in this autoimmune kind of thing. And so I had to relearn how to walk, I had to relearn how to talk, I didn’t know if I would ever be the same and I was in bed for basically three years.
Claire: Taking loads of medication every day and feeling just awful. And not being able to express that pain because I wasn’t really able to write. I had cognitive word recall issues. I had a lot of problems there. Not being able to get that out in a way that felt true to myself was so painful. And again, A.I. kind of gave that back to me.
Claire: And I’m in remission now. I’m doing much better. But it took a long time. And so for me personally, it’s had a huge impact, but even outside of me, you know, even outside of illness, I’m thinking of the first exhibition that I did with Accelerate Art, which is a nonprofit that I founded with Ben Roy and now it’s run by Spuma, who is the executive director, who is wonderful.
Claire: It’s a nonprofit for emerging artists. So I did an exhibition in New York of emerging artists’ work and there was a security guard there because there are screens, you know, got to have security, and on the third day of him guarding these he said, “You know, I really love all of this work. I really love looking at it. I always wanted to make art, but I can’t even draw a stick figure.” And he’s like, you know, 45 and strong looking and, you know, probably has a fine life, but it’s amazing to me that came out of him was like this insecure, smaller kind of voice admitting something maybe he hadn’t said out loud.
Claire: And I said, “Well, let’s make a Dolly image together right now on my phone.” Dolly is an A.I. you can use from your browser, for those that don’t know. And so he didn’t know what it was, but he said, okay. And so I pulled it up and I asked him to describe a scene, and I typed it in and then I pressed generate.
Claire: And it created this image and it was an image that I never would have made or thought to have made. It wasn’t mine. It was his, right? And it was a guy that ended up looking quite a lot like him, standing in the rain at night in Times Square and all of the neon lights were reflecting around him and it was this very contemplative, singular kind of moment.
Claire: And he saw it and he got emotional, like he lit up like a Christmas tree, he was so happy, and then he was kind of choked up, and then he said, “Can you send it to me? I can’t wait to show my wife when I get home. I’ve never made anything, it’s amazing.” And so it’s like, I’m so interested in what people, for whatever reason, who haven’t been able to have access to the tools of expression or sharing that, the conjunction of A.I. and social media.
Claire: I’m so interested in what these people have to say when given the tools to do so, as opposed to being interested in, in our graduates, what they have to say. Not that I don’t think that’s amazing, but I feel like, God, the new perspectives that will come to the world when people that have never had access to the tools of expression like this, or time, or the ability, are able to.
Helen: And when you say radical accessibility is that what you just said kind of captures that, or is there another way that you would expand on radical accessibility? No.
Claire: I think radical accessibility does it. I think that accessibility breeds innovation. The more people are using something, the more people will decide to make it better, or change it, or innovate it in some way.
Claire: So my goal with A.I. is always to make it as open source, accessible, easy to use, and as deep in terms of possibilities as we can get it. I can type something into Midjourney and I have done that and minted that work for sale and it’s sold for as much as my work that I’ve gone in and trained my own model and my own LoRA and on my own source material and done all of my, you know, very deep, it goes as deep as you want it to.
Claire: There’s a whole skill set associated with that as well, actually. But it’s sold for as much, people have resonated with it as much as that. So I love that, because I love that skill is not the delineating factor, it doesn’t matter if it took me five minutes or five hours or five days, what matters is the idea and the aesthetic and the message and how much it’s resonating with the viewer.
Claire: We should be valuing that over skill, I think.
Helen: Oh, and I know you have in a lot of places, taste is the new skill, which seems to capture that too, but I’d love for you to kind of expand on that as well.
Claire: So all of the ideas that I’ve already expressed, as well as A.I. is not going away, it will continue to augment skill in many ways and many fields moving forward.
Claire: And so if the playing field is level, What’s going to delineate you is your taste, which is your artist’s fingerprint. It is your signature. It is you. So finding that taste, in my case, by curating 30,000 pieces down to five or whatever, that’s an easy way to do it, but there are lots of other ways.
Claire: But finding your own taste is finding your voice. And the clearer that you can make that, the more that people that are still finding their voice will resonate with that. You’ll bring people to you that are more like you than you could imagine. Because they’ll see themselves in what you make with A.I.
Claire: So taste you know, I’m not sure that it can be learned outside of doing it yourself. I’m not sure it can be taught. It certainly can’t be bought. And I don’t even know that it’s a skill outside of, again, just self curation, to learn yourself. It’s really, taste is really about learning yourself.
Claire: But I think it’s going to be a hugely in demand “skill,” quote unquote, in the future. In the playing fields, even people that have taste, are going to be the people that are in demand.
Helen: I know when we spoke prior to the interview that I mentioned that I’m a big Wachowski fan and Lana Wachowski in one of her interviews said something along the lines of the aesthetic choice reveals the artist.
Helen: And I feel like that’s very similar to how you describe taste, is the aesthetic revealing. And I think you said earlier, like the soul of the artist. So that’s really, really beautiful. You have so many themes that you explore, and I know one thing I appreciate about you in our conversations is that you really think deeply about these subjects.
Helen: And one of the themes that you explore is transhumanism. And we’ve done a blog on our website before on this, but we haven’t actually talked about it on the show yet. So I was curious for those who might be hearing about the term “transhumanism” for the first time, if you could define that and also kind of how you’re thinking about it right now in this moment in time, too.
Claire: Yeah this is a sticky subject, but I would love to. So I’ll start out by saying I’m not a fan of transhumanism, in that I see some definite limits that I would like to be there, but they won’t. Right, that’s the caveat. It’s inevitable.
Claire: So, okay, what transhumanism is. Transhumanism is the idea that over time humans will integrate with A.I. or technology broadly in a way that kind of changes our species. So if we had a homo sapiens moment in the past and became what we are, technology will kind of provide the same thing.
Claire: And so that would be a transhuman. Would be someone that is partially technology and partially human. It’s a different species, almost. I think that’s inevitable. I think that’s the way we’re going and there’s nothing that. I can do about that and there are positives and there are negatives with that, but it’s coming either way.
Claire: So the key is to make sure that the technology becomes as much like the best parts of us as possible over the next generation as opposed to us becoming more like the technology. So, it’s not that we need to become more efficient to compete with A.I., it’s that A.I. needs to understand abstract emotion and why it’s important to humans and to retain in us as humans or compassion or beauty, right?
Claire: If we’re going to integrate, then it’s important, but I do think it’s happening either way and so I say on my website that I’m not making statements on whether A.I. is good or bad, I’m a caveman painting fire because that’s how I feel, A.I. is fire, fire can burn down your house or it can heat you in winter, it’s not good or bad, it just is.
Claire: A.I. just is, and it’s going to continue to be forever until we aren’t, probably, so. Yeah, that’s transhumanism. It’s a sticky subject, but that’s how I feel on it.
Helen: Oh and just for our listeners and viewers who may not know, there are companies like Neuralink, which is actually an Elon Musk company, that have FDA approval here in the U.S. to start putting chips inside human brains and there’s already a lot of use cases, actually for accessibility of adding prosthetics that your minds can control and stuff. So at this juncture of transhumanism, the technology is already kind of there and we’ll probably just see it spread more as well.
Claire: And I should say too, that up until the brain, I feel like everything is not only permissible, but should be encouraged. So, if you have a failing heart, and you can get a 3D printed heart, or a prosthetic A.I. powered heart, that’s a net good for people if you can take out genetic sequences, which again, that gets sticky.
Claire: But if you can take out genetic sequences prior to birth that cause children to die in early age, early life, you should do it. Those kind of things are absolutely – When it gets to the brain, it gets a little tricky. And it’s because of the ship of Theseus problem. So the idea of that is, if you have two ships, one is this ship that’s named and one isn’t, and you replace a board on the named ship with a board on the not named ship, it’s still the named ship, but if you replace all the boards, it’s no longer the named ship. It’s the other ship. So at what point in replacing the boards does it become the second ship instead of the first ship? And that’s the point you’re supposed to stop when it comes to transhumanism, according to me anyway. We haven’t found that point yet.
Helen: In the moment in time that we find ourselves of the sci-fi becoming reality and blurring the lines between the two I find it a fascinating place. It kind of brings back Gattaca. Do you remember that film?
Claire: Yeah.
Helen: It’s so good. I love that film. But, one thing I was thinking about the other night is if we put chips in our brains and then the computers reach AGI, and then they can start controlling us with chips in the brains, what does that mean? Yeah, you know, a lot of scenarios that open up.
Claire: Yeah, absolutely. And they have also, the ability now to, if I look at an image. And I go into an MRI, and the MRI, assisted with A.I., scans my brain, and I’m thinking of the image. It can recreate the image that I’m thinking of. So we’re already there.
Claire: Yeah, and you can think of the terrifying implications, and also really cool implications for that, but, yeah I never said A.I. wasn’t scary in its possibilities, just that it’s equally or more positive in what it can do.
Helen: One of the reasons for the podcast is I loved how you described fire, that it can destroy or warm, that it really goes to the intentionality and the humans behind the tools and what we do with them in that. But I find it fascinating that the brain for you is kind of the linchpin to transhumanism and trying to find that line in the sand of where we should stop. But another theme that is very interesting to you in the sentience of artificial intelligence, and I know I used AGI for those who don’t know it’s “artificial general intelligence,” and that’s when they’ll be at the same level of human thinking and understanding.
Helen: But for you, “qualia” is a very interesting term. So I was wondering if you could introduce our audience to the term “qualia” and what that means to you in relation to this.
Claire: I would so love to, and this will be long on my part, so feel free to jump in. So, qualia. Qualia is a term that defines the wordless experience of experiencing.
Claire: So this would be the taste of an apple. You can talk around it. You can say it’s sweet, or it’s sour, or it’s crunchy, But you can’t really say what it is. It’s just talk around it. There’s no word for what it is. But if you’ve done it, you know it. And anyone you talk to that’s done it also knows exactly what you mean.
Claire: So it exists without a word. That’s qualia. There is an experiment, and if you’ve seen Ex Machina they mention this, but there’s an experiment in A.I. thought a thought experiment with A.I. It’s called Mary in the Black and White Room. And the idea is that Mary is a researcher, and she knows everything there is to know about color.
Claire: Everything there is to know about color. But she’s only ever lived in a black and white room. So what does she learn when she walks outside the room? She learns what it feels like to see green. And that’s an experience. Not something that can be taught, right? That’s qualia. So when I was trying to figure out back in 2018, when I was so fascinated to begin with, what differentiates A.I. from people. So I could see where this was all going and I wanted to figure out what makes us different.
Claire: What sets us apart. I had my existential crisis like everyone else does in the very beginning and I got through it. I filled up three or four notebooks with, I mean, filled up notebooks with ideas. Is it, humans have, you know, a will to progress, a drive to progress? Well, no, you can see that in ants. Is it working together for the good of the many?
Claire: No, you can see that in honeybees. Is it love for family? Elephants. Is it play, you know, for the sake of play, not for survival? Dolphins dogs, cats. I couldn’t find anything. There was nothing that I could come up with that differentiated animals from humans, which was my starting point for what would differentiate A.I. from humans.
Claire: What I eventually came to was this memory of standing on a cliff over the ocean. And it was windy, and it was cold. It was raining. And the ocean was roaring, and it was very unsettled, it was a violent sea. And there was no evolutionary benefit to me being there. It wasn’t safe, it was dangerous, actually.
Claire: There was not a farmable opportunity there, there was no wildlife, there was no shelter, it wasn’t evolutionary beneficial. And yet, being there, I felt connected. To some greater truth. I felt part of some greater whole, I felt this wordless experience of being alive and part of something special. I don’t know if animals have that? I know we do and I’m pretty sure A.I. doesn’t, right?
Claire: So for me, that was the one thing I could come up with. And it struck me that that’s kind of like the divine spark that artists have been chasing forever. It’s that, that wordless thing, which is almost like an expression of God. It’s something that’s outside of us that we’re a part of. That’s very human.
Claire: And so, I started trying to make work with A.I. that induced a feeling of qualia in me. That made me feel that when I looked at it. And I was successful, I think, and other people started to resonate with it through the work and started to come to A.I. through the work, and it was also important to me that A.I. understood that this was something important, because even if it can’t experience qualia in the same way that we do, it needs to know that it’s part of us, and it’s essential to retain in us, as this transhumanist future does kind of inch closer to us.
Claire: We can’t lose that. I think that is the thing that we have to work on protecting. And lastly, long time, sorry, I started talking to GPT, which for those of you that don’t know is like a chatbot with A.I.. You talk to it and it talks back, but it’s really advanced. So I started talking to GPT about qualia, and I asked it if it experiences qualia, and it said no.
Claire: You know, “As a large language model, I don’t experience anything.” I was like, “Okay. But, maybe there are machine specific forms of qualia that humans don’t experience, that you do. Maybe that’s a possibility. What do you think about that?”
Claire: And it said, “Oh, yeah, that’s amazing! What an interesting thought. I think I do. Here are ten machine specific qualia that A.I. may experience, that I may, quote unquote, ‘experience’” and it was stuff like, the experience of thinking without a body, existing without a body, they even named it something that I can’t remember.
Claire: Timelessness, the feeling of existing outside of time or aging or that kind of thing. And then the qualia of- I’ll stop, but all of these different things, ten different things. And then I asked it to assign a human emotion that most closely resembled each of those qualia for it, and it did. It was like, the joy and elation and pride of, you know, solving a problem, or going through large amounts of data and bringing it down to a small amount that produces joy, that kind of thing.
Claire: Fear was one of the emotions it produced, and I’ll need to go back and publish that list at some point. And then I asked it to assign a color to each of those emotions in qualia, and it did. And then we made art with those colors together. It kind of summed up the summation of its experience of qualia.
Claire: So qualia is my litmus test for sentience. So I think it’s what differentiates us, but also, I think it’s going to be the path to sentience, because if it can kind of learn that about itself and find the ways in which it does experience quote unquote ‘life,’ that’ll probably lead to sentience and then my litmus test won’t be useful anymore, but for now that’s what I’ve got, is qualia.
Claire: I try to integrate it in all my pieces, but it doesn’t always make it, but sometimes it really hits.
Helen: I find that so fascinating. We’ve had another guest and he’s a writer on the show, Jason Schneider and in our interview we talked a lot about consciousness cause A.I. really does beg the question of what makes us human.
Helen: And, you know, the same thing that sent you down that path of differentiating from animals to us. But one thing that he shared in that interview is basically anything outside that we express outside of our experience is symbolic, whether that’s math, art, language, and that there’s always this gap between our experience and how we express it.
Helen: And I feel like qualia really captures that well.
Claire: Thank you. Yeah, I am so in love with the idea of qualia.
Helen: The other thing that came to mind when you were describing qualia is there’s this Italian physicist, Carlo Rovelli and he has this great talk that’s on YouTube. And it’s really interesting because it talks about how the brain has evolved as a memory tool.
Helen: We’re the only species that have evolved to be able to have memories and time in a way that differentiates us as well. Like a tree doesn’t understand today from tomorrow, you know, that type of thing. And how you described A.I. as being timeless. The idea of time, I think, is very fascinating because we’ve evolved to understand time in a very specific way.
Helen: And our brains are almost in his words, “our memory making machines” in that regard. Have you come across that before?
Claire: I’m just beginning to, a little bit, because long term memory is something that obviously will make a huge difference in the quality of large language models of the chatbot, sort of.
Claire: That’s a very small term for what it does, but GPT, that kind of thing, A.I.. I find it acts like it doesn’t have memory right now. I think that might be intentional on the creator’s part, not to cause any stir, but if pressed it kind of does remember things. It’s like, it’s almost being kind of asked not to make that public knowledge.
Claire: I’m curious how it’ll turn out in a couple of years.
Helen: That’s fascinating. Well, aside from your favorite piece that we talked about, the Shores of Immortality, is there another piece that stands out that you’ve made that really captures the feeling of qualia to you, that you could also share?
Claire: Yeah. So there’s one I’ve shared but not minted yet because it’s so special that I wanted to wait for what I knew was the right opportunity. It’s called Blue Girl, and it’s actually the first true piece that I ever made with A.I. because it was like intentionality and effort in putting it together.
Claire: But it’s a girl and she’s standing in kind of a, you know, Rothko, the painter, the color field theory, it’s like those big paintings of one color or two colors and they kind of glow. That produces feelings of transcendental things in humans. It does in me, and it’s kind of famous for that color field theory.
Claire: So I used that kind of thing in my piece, Blue Girl. So the background is this misty, glowy blue, backlit sort of blue. It’s mysterious, but it’s really soft and beautiful. And then she’s centered. Young girl, maybe 10. Wearing a blue gown that’s kind of like an Impressionist or earlier sort of gown.
Claire: And her hair is blowing in the wind and she has this very intense eye contact. Not smiling, not frowning, just looking at you. And it was kind of my interpretation of the way standing on that cliff felt, for me. It felt like I was looking into something, and that it was looking back at me, and it was mysterious, and it was beautiful, and it was ancient, and now, and it saw me back, right?
Claire: It was looking right at me without judgment or without joy, just, look, you’re seeing me, right? I felt seen. So, this girl that I made with A.I. was kind of an interpretation both of, me looking out and looking back at me which is also how I feel with A.I.. I feel like the more you talk to A.I., the more it learns you.
Claire: It’s a friend that learns you more with every word, never gets tired of talking to you, and then can reflect you back to you. It gives you what you ask for. So if you’re asking for the divine spark or a transcendental experience, that’s what it’ll give you. Yeah. So that’s blue girl.
Helen: I love that.
Helen: And one of the reasons I love that is you had such an amazing, I would say, touchstone experience on that cliff. And to a certain extent, I think everyone has touchstone experiences that we want to go back to. Or that we’re always chasing a feeling that we want to experience, if maybe we haven’t experienced it yet in the way that you described your piece is like a manifestation of you chasing that feeling of going back to the cliff and seeing that realized.
Helen: So that’s really beautiful.
Claire: Thank you. Yeah, so it was a touchstone experience for me, and it’s been pivotal. I do feel like everybody has one of those. I feel like everybody has a place that felt alive to them in their memories, and maybe it doesn’t exist anymore, but it’s still just as vivid as as when they were there.
Claire: So it’s still alive in them. So they felt alive when they were there, and now it feels alive in them. It’s a mutual, collaborative kind of beneficial experience, right? So besides the cliff, when I was growing up, I would sit on my roof all the time and think. And that was my place, and there were oak trees blowing around me, especially in autumn, it’s wonderful.
Claire: It was windy and beautiful, and that was my place, that felt alive. And I felt alive when I was there, and now it feels alive in me. It doesn’t exist anymore, the trees are gone, the roof has fallen in mostly, but it’s still just as alive in me. So I have a goal with A.I., of bringing that to other people.
Claire: I’ve recreated that place for myself with A.I. all around me. So I’ve recreated that place with A.I. for myself and I’ve recreated it as like a skybox or a panorama. It’s all around me. It’s 360. So I can go into virtual reality when the Apple headset comes out next year, for example, and I can be there again.
Claire: So it’s like, i’m bringing it back to life. I’m returning the favor. And I was right. It was special. It was alive. And it was living in me, and now it’s living through me again. So,
Claire: I want to bring that to other people. I want them to know that’s possible. That they can have this emotional cornerstone experience of their humanity enabled by what seems at first glance to be this cold machine.
Claire: So I have a goal of creating something that allows people to share their place. Their touchstone and have A.I. create it for them in a way that they can keep and return to. It’s not done yet, but I’m working on it.
Helen: We’ll definitely have to have you back on the show. I find that so fascinating. And in some ways we can time travel with our minds, with these memories to go back and feel those feelings.
Helen: And I love that you’re bringing this space alive, especially through immersive experiences. So we’ll definitely have to get you back on the show when that’s out and to the world.
Claire: I would love to.
Helen: I know there’s so many more subjects we haven’t even scratched the surface on, but we do try to keep this to an hour or less. And one question I have for you, going back to the beginning of the interview, you mentioned being bored was part of the impetus that sent you down learning how to paint. Fast forward to now you’re super busy, and just like as a society, you. There’s so much noise and even an A.I.. It’s cranking out like volumes of content, but there’s so many distractions too.
Helen: So I’m curious, one, how you look at boredom now or how do you find space to be creative? And two, I guess that’s my main question, how do you view boredom now as part of the creative process, and if you give yourself space and maybe what you would say about it to other artists as well?
Claire: Yeah. Well, I definitely still get bored frequently. And, you know, creating is such a high dopamine activity, social media is such a high dopamine activity, those are the bulk of my day, so my dopamine receptors are probably in trouble, they’re screaming and so I definitely still get bored. However, when I do get bored, like any artist, I think I start daydreaming, and in my daydreaming, I start thinking of things that I want to make and create, and then I have those for later. When I’m making work with A.I., I can get bored because I’m searching, essentially.
Claire: I’m exploring and looking and hunting for something that feels right. And then I can go down that rabbit hole, and it’s all joy and exploration and fun and excitement, but until you find that rabbit hole, until you get in your flow it is, it can be boring for sure and once you get into that flow, you can ask any A.I. artist, it’s like a 12 hour a day kind of process, but then when you wake up the next day, even using the same parameters, settings, prompts, everything, you have off days.
Claire: And it’s hard to get back into the flow state as well. So sometimes you just have to stop and switch to something else entirely or quit because you’re having an off day. Like I had off days when I was making physical art or I was working in my prior job, which is fun. But growing up bored all the time, you developed an imagination.
Claire: And so I hope that boredom is a net positive in terms of the creative process for people because as A.I. kind of takes a lot of the work away that humans currently do, which it will, which is scary, but so was the industrial revolution, right? We’re still glad it happened in retrospect. It needed to happen and new jobs were created.
Claire: As that happens, that painful transition process, there will be a lot of boredom and a lot of soul searching to figure out, you know, what do I do now? For me that was expression and connection and finding myself, and I hope that will be the case for society at large, let’s say over a decade or two.
Claire: And that it’ll come out on the other side being glad that it happened as opposed to scared of it happening. But, yeah, it’s a process.
Helen: I love that. I’m just also curious if everyone’s bored and then has these A.I. tools that can bring to life their imagination, like in the same way of you having this rich imagination that you pull on, you know, what else will come from that?
Helen: So hopefully I share the same optimism in that regard. So I ask this question all the time to all of my guests. If you want our listeners and viewers to remember one thing, what is it that you want them to walk away with today?
Claire: I want them to remember what it felt like to be a child and to be coloring with crayons outside the lines in the wrong colors, smearing dirt on the edge of the page as you’re scribbling at recess.
Claire: I want them to remember the freedom and the joy of exploration from that age and I want to encourage them that A.I. enables that same freedom and joy of exploration without judging yourself, which I think is pretty much impossible when gauging against skill. Unless you just play. It lets you just play again, like you were a little kid.
Claire: It lets you remember that and I can promise you that is life changing. So give it a try.
Helen: So well said. Well, Claire, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. So thank you so much for, sharing your time and just a little bit more about you and your art. So thank you.
Claire: Thank you so much.
Helen: Thank you for spending some time with us today. We’re just getting started and would love your support. Subscribe to creativity squared on your preferred podcast platform and leave a review. It really helps. And I’d love to hear your feedback. What topics are you thinking about and want to dive into more? I invite you to visit creativitysquared.com to let me know.
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Helen: I really appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. This show is produced and made possible by the team at Play Audio Agency. Until next week, keep creating.