Ep44. Salvador Dalí: Expand Your Mind on Immortality, Art, and A.I.

Helen: Hello, Mr. Dali. My name is Helen Todd. I have a podcast called Creativity Squared that explores the intersection of AI and creativity. Will you be a guest? And what is the best question to ask you?

Martin: Alright, alright. Mr. Dali, would you be interested in being a guest on a podcast that explores the intersection between AI and creativity? And what would be a good question to ask you on such a podcast? Did I get it right? Alright.

Salvador: Imagining a conversation with a digital mind meets the delirious heart of creation, I am intrigued to dissect the enigma of AI and creativity.

Salvador: You could ask: “How can the cold calculated precision of artificial intelligence be melted? Into the surreal liquid dreams of human creativity? A fusion of opposites; a dialogue between the mechanical and the mystical, that is where the future lies.”
Martin: I’m not going to ask him that question now because maybe we can explore that on the podcast.

Helen: To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Surrealism, we have a special Creativity Squared episode for you today with none other than the legendary Surrealist artist Salvador Dali, or rather the AI version of him. The artist famously wrote, “If someday I may die, though it is unlikely, I hope the people in the cafes will say, Dali has died, but not entirely.”

Helen: The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida is one of the most innovative museums in the world. Today, they’re unveiling its latest project bringing Salvador Dali back to life through artificial intelligence called Ask Dali. This custom built chatbot is trained on Dali’s writings and voice so museum goers can interact directly with the artist.

Helen: To add color and context to this conversation, we also have Martin Pagh Ludvigsen joining us. Martin and I met at SXSW after he was on a panel called Salvador Dali, AI and the Future of Creativity. As Dali was demoed on stage with a lobster telephone and as you heard in the opening, I asked if Dali would be a guest on Creativity Squared.

Helen: Martin is a creative technologist, AI director, and the head of labs at Goodby, Silverstein and Partners. Originally from Denmark, Martin holds degrees in computer science and theater science, where his creative journey started by moving his body on stages and then by moving pixels on screens, Martin uses cutting edge tech to tell stories for brands and has directed award winning work globally.

Helen: Like many others, Martin likes to tinker and break things, but unlike most, he also likes putting them back together in new and unexpected ways. The Dali museum is a client of. Goodby, Silverstein, and Partners. And Martin was instrumental in bringing Ask Dali to life. You’ll learn more about this project and the museum’s other groundbreaking work using VR, synthetic media, and Open AI’s Dali in their exhibitions.

Helen: And yes, you’ll also get to hear Dali answer questions at the intersection of AI and creativity on today’s show. Including the one he quote unquote recommended on stage at SXSW. What is Dali’s answer to the question? How can the cold, calculated precision of artificial intelligence be melted into the surreal, liquid dreams of human creativity?

Helen: Listen in to find out. 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 AI and creativity to envision a world where artists thrive.

Helen: Martin, welcome to Creativity Squared.

Martin: Thank you. Happy to be here.

Helen: It’s so good to have you on the show Martin and I met in Austin at SXSW this past March and he spoke on the panel Salvador Dali AI and the Future of Creativity. It was one of my favorite sessions, especially having the podcast that explores the intersection of AI and creativity and this actually kind of came from the session itself, which you heard in the opening, where I asked Dali if he could be a guest on the show.

Helen: So we’re in for a special treat today. But before we dive into that, Martin, for those who are meeting you for the first time, can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your origin story?

Martin: Yeah, absolutely. So, I’m Martin. I’m originally from Denmark. And I like to say my creative journey started on the stage as a performer.

Martin: And then I started – so I was moving on the stage and then I learned how to make pixels move on the screen with ActionScript, which is a programming language that you use to program [Adobe] Flash. One of the early internet platforms that was used to make animations and games and big applications. I found out that it pays better to make pixels move on screen than to make yourself move on stage. I was also better at making pixels move than myself.

Martin: So I sort of transitioned into that world. Along the way I got a degree in computer science and theater at the same time from the University of Copenhagen and IT University of Copenhagen and started working in a digital production company in Copenhagen called Framfab, which is actually a Swedish name, a shortening of “the future factory,” a very early incident name for a company that has since been absorbed and acquired and rolled into one of the big networks.

Martin: Then I got the opportunity to move to the United States in 2010 to come work in digital production, another Swedish company actually called Acne Production that brought me over. And some of the first projects that I worked on, we were having a, I think it was a late night Skype call.

Martin: Remember Skype? Where they told me that they had just sold a really big project to this agency called Goodby, Silverstein and Partners, and they weren’t quite sure how to build it, but they had managed to sell it through and they needed someone who could actually help build it. So they described what it was and I said, yeah.

Martin: I know how to build that. So they hired me and they brought me over and I built that project and 14 years went by. We’re in 2024 now. And actually my journey has sort of come full circle because now I work for the very same agency that the production company sold that project to back then.

Martin: Goodby, Silverstein and Partners, one of the most celebrated advertising agencies in the world to be honest, and one that I’m really proud to work for. And I’ve gone from moving pixels with ActionScript to now being the director of AI and creative technology at Goodby, Silverstein and Partners and leader of what we call The Labs, which is an in house innovation and creative technology unit.

Martin: That does experiments and builds amazing things. And try things out. It’s a lab. So sometimes our experiments fail, but sometimes they succeed massively. And it’s a really fun place to work with a lot of amazing, amazingly talented coworkers and opportunities to do great things. Sometimes we even get to do art.

Helen: Well, thank you for sharing that. And I know on stage you introduced yourself or use the words “creative technologist” to describe what you do and who you are. So I was wondering if you could kind of expand on what that means to you because you sit in such an interesting intersection of the tech and creative side in the role that you play.

Martin: Yeah, it is a title that I decided to fully embrace when it emerged. It emerged around 2010-2011 or something like that. I already mentioned that I work in Flash. A lot of people [used it] back then; that was really like the platform where creative coders could see things come to life and build applications and do amazing things on the web.

Martin: I worked with a really, really talented developer back then, he was a freelancer we had hired. His name is Felix Turner, still does amazing work today. Shout out to him. And he said that a creative technologist is someone who knows more than one programming language, which I thought was really hilarious as a programmer.

Martin: But a transition was happening at the time where we had Flash and ActionScript as like the one tool to do everything. And then a gentleman named Steve Jobs killed Flash. He said Flash is not going to be available on the iPhone because it’s a terrible platform. So that’s just not going to happen. And a lot of people realized, “Oh, well, this smartphone thing, it actually looks like it’s here to stay.”

Martin: So the one tool that we have gotten really good at, it’s not going to be around for much longer. So, that sort of caused a rift where people started spreading in all sorts of directions, moving onto different platforms. I stopped [00:10:23] being a web developer and started being a director instead, directing other people to do work.

Martin: But it meant that you had to suddenly have a whole like, quiver of tools in your technology stack to allow you to work. So a creative technologist is someone who harnesses and uses different technologies to do creative work. It’s also a title that I think a lot of us have embraced to protect ourselves from big tech and from being software developers, because I’m not particularly interested in building great big insurance systems or banking systems using software development that, I mean, I respect people who want to do that and find joy in that.

Martin: But I prefer to use my skills as a developer as a technologist to do art and creativity that people can see out there in the world and I can point to and say, “Hey, look, I made that and I’m really proud of it.”

Helen: Very cool. I love that title. So thank you for expanding. And one of the very cool clients that you have at your agency is the Dali Museum.

Helen: And you’ve got to do some really interesting projects with the Dolly Museum. A lot of your talk at SXSW was about this, but I’d love for you to kind of introduce the Dolly Museum and some of the kind of groundbreaking work that you started with, with VR, with the museum and some other projects that you’ve done with them.

Martin: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It is a very dear client of ours. And I mean, we are an advertising agency, so that means we tell stories for brands to help brands solve their business problems, build their brands, sell their products, so on and so forth. And the work we do, we’re very proud of it.

Martin: It’s great craft. We have extremely talented creatives working on it. We work with artists on it, but I think it’s a mistake to call advertising, art. At least most advertising, 99 percent of it. Sometimes it gets to a point where it gets elevated, becomes art, it becomes culture, but that’s not the goal that we have to begin with.

Martin: The goal is to solve business problems for our clients. But then we have this client, the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, that is a little bit different from that. Because we basically put all of our skills as an advertising agency without great account people, strategists, creatives, thinkers, technologists at work to do great work with them.

Martin: So the relationship between Goodby, Silverstein and Partners and the Dali Museum starts with the relationship between two people: Jeff Goodby, one of our partners, it’s in the name, and Hank Hine, the executive director of the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg. They met, I believe, through their kids going to the same school and became friends and had sort of an interesting story of finding out that they were very interested in the same things.

Martin: Jeff Goodby as a creative, as most creatives, is obviously very interested in art. He’s very interested in surrealism. He’s very interested in Salvador Dali. So, so this meeting with someone at the Dali Museum, well, actually if you go back even further, Hank Hein was running a design school over on the East coast and was then chosen to come be the director for the Dali Museum and decided to sort of bring his relationship with Jeff Goodby with him.

Martin: They have an interesting story, something about Jeff Goodby being knighted into the order of Dali, which I believe involves some alcohol and some rituals and a sword and things like that. The story changes every time they tell it.

Martin: But I’m very, it’s very clear that there is a strong friendship between those two men and that friendship leads to trust and that trust leads to us having the opportunity to do some truly amazing activations over the year. So, to sort of quickly walk through some of the work that we’ve done with them, which all of it, we’re just incredibly proud of.

Martin: You mentioned virtual reality. We created a project as far back as 2016 called Dreams of Dali. That’s a long time in technology years. And that really was a stand out experience in the world of virtual reality. So we have this platform back then called the Oculus Rift headset you can put on, which allows you to immerse yourself in a world.

Martin: Basically it takes over two of your senses, your vision and your hearing. So instead of looking at art in a frame in front of you, the art actually immerses you, you become one with it. And I had a great chat with Dr. Hein at one point, I come from theater, as I mentioned and in theater, one of the things that I was really inspired by idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or the total work of art.

Martin: Obviously, he was a great opera maker, someone who, I mean, his work couldn’t get big enough; the operas were super long and super immersive and all that. So he really was looking to create this like, ideal of the perfect work of art that fully immerses you across all channels.

Martin: And in working with the museum, we learned that Salvador Dali, he was mainly known as a painter, right? But he was also a sculptor and he made the first music video. He made holograms with Alice Cooper. He made movies. He experimented with all these different channels to basically bring his visions to life.

Martin: And I think he was trying to reach that ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the work of art that completely immerses the observer. So, you know, in a way there’s no escape. Which I actually think sometimes can be an interesting observation about the work of Salvador Dali. It’s very much in your face and sometimes it can be hard to escape it.

Martin: But at least when you see it in a frame in front of you, you can walk away and close your eyes. In Dreams of Dali, you’re there. You’re fully in it. And we explore some of his works, take you through this magical journey. And it really is quite spectacular and beautiful and something that I highly encourage people to experience it if they can.

Martin: It’s still available in the Dali Museum. And if you have one of the VR headsets that connects to a computer; so that unfortunately doesn’t mean the Meta Quest 2 and 3, because they’re standalone. But if you have one that can connect to a computer, you can still download Dreams of Dali in the, I think it’s called the Oculus Store nowadays and try it for yourself.

Martin: And I highly encourage that. We booted it up a couple of weeks ago, tried it again. And it’s like, I can’t believe this thing is eight years old. It’s so fresh and so, so intense. It’s also, you don’t want to be in there for too long. You know, some people are already prone to motion sickness in virtual reality.

Martin: And when it’s virtual, so real reality that, that really can push you over the edge.

Helen: Oh, I definitely want to get down to the museum in St. Petersburg to experience it. And you did show a demo at SXSW which we’ll put the video in the dedicated blog post that goes with this episode.

Helen: But I couldn’t think of a better immersive VR experience than a dreamscape that Dali has. And one thing that you had mentioned too, on stage is that Facebook made the big announcement with Oculus and that you had the developer kit in 2016. So you were at the very, very early cusp of the first VR wave, I should say.

Martin: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, I mentioned that our unit in Goodby Silverstein is called Labs. So I wasn’t part of founding Labs. There were some other people, but actually some people that I also work closely with. But this whole virtual reality has sort of existed as a dream for a very long time but when the first Oculus Rift came out, it was a Kickstarter project.

Martin: Remember those? The production company I worked at back in the day, we backed that on Kickstarter because we were like, “Okay this we got to see what this is.” And we received it. And it was this weird, cheap feeling piece of plastic that you strapped to your face and there wasn’t much available software for it.

Martin: You really had to figure out how to build things for it yourself. But wow, this was really something. So that was the Kickstarter version. Then the next version was called the developer kit, which is the one that we got our hands on to build Dreams of Dali. And it really was an experimental version.

Martin: You can even see in the video, if you share that, the person in the video is actually wearing the development kit. The consumer version of the hardware didn’t come out until 2017 or 18 or something like that. So this was all running on basically experimental hardware, and it definitely was experimental software as well.

Helen: That’s so cool. It sounds like you have one of the funnest jobs ever so very cool.

Martin: Yeah I mean, when we get into some of the projects we’re talking about later; Monday, I was like, okay, I’m just going to go down to the loading dock and prime a lobster for the installation that we’re building with prime spray paints.

Martin: And they’re like, wow, I can’t believe I get to do this for a living. I’m definitely enjoying myself. So that was one of the first big ones, a big success for the museum, a big success for us. After that we started moving into using artificial intelligence as sort of a tool to enable us to bring the work of Dali to a wider audience.

Martin: You might notice I took a little pause there before I said artificial intelligence because I’m aware that there is – I prefer the term machine learning. It’s not intelligent. It is machines that can learn things and do what we do, but I’m also aware that we in the machine learning community have lost the branding war and artificial intelligence is sort of the term that we need to use for people to understand it.

Martin: But anyway, so I’ll stick to artificial intelligence, but we moved into that. And one of the things, one of the ideas that we’ve had for a while, and this is actually an interesting way that things work, that we constantly have ideas simmering at the agency. We have so many great, talented creatives and they will come to us in labs with these ideas.

Martin: And sometimes we have to tell them this is an amazing idea, but you know, the technology is not quite there yet. We still need to wait for some breakthrough to happen in research, for some tech platform to release something. Dali Lives was the next project that was someone’s great idea. Can we bring Dali back to life somehow?

Martin: And there was a new concept, a paper that came out that described something called “generative adversarial networks,” which is just an incredible title. So GANS, G A N S and this was a concept where you have a machine with two agents in it.

Martin: One is, one agent looks at some real data, a real image, and then it tries to recreate something that looks like the real image. And the other agent is then looking at the image that gets generated. And it’s trying to determine if it’s fake or real. Fake or real. So it keeps doing that. And at the beginning the images look horrible.

Martin: They look like nothing. So it knows, okay, this is fake, this is fake, this is fake. So the other agents keep refining the output until it gets to a point where the other agents [say] “Okay, I think this is real. I think this is real.” And then it gets to a point where 50 percent of the time it thinks it’s fake and 50 percent of the time it thinks it’s real.

Martin: And that means that we have reached an equilibrium where it is indistinguishable from the real thing. It’s a deep learning technique. It’s fake data. So you might even have that we’re talking about branding. Someone thought, “Oh, deep fakes. That’s a great name for it.” So back when we started using generative adversarial networks to create generative art this way, it was like, “Yeah, that’s a great label for it.”

Martin: But obviously deep fakes have since come to be almost only something that carries a negative connotation. And for good reason, because unfortunately bad actors use it to do bad things. But it is nevertheless the same technology that we used to film an actor who was the same sort of stature [and] age as Salvador Dali.

Martin: But then with the generative adversarial network, we could learn from images of Salvador Dali and put them on top of the actor’s face and turn this actor into Salvador Dali in a very convincing way. And this is an installation that is live in the museum today, where you can walk up and have a number of different interactions with Salvador Dali in this kiosk that we have put up there.

Martin: I believe we have a couple of them live. You can have some conversations with them. One of the amazing things about this is Salvador Dali proclaiming that he doesn’t believe in his own death. And asking us the question, do you, and I think it’s so powerful because we obviously, we often say about artists that they will live on forever through their art.

Martin: I think it went a little further with Salvador Dali. I actually think that he believes that somehow his spirit lives on, that he’s immortal in a way. And when we bring him back to life through an experience like that, I think he actually has a point. Because as a visitor to the museum, you walk up and there it is, there is Salvador Dali, and you can even take a selfie with him.

Martin: Actually, he’s the one shooting the selfie. So who’s to say, doesn’t that mean that he’s alive right there with you at that moment? I think he is, and I think he would agree.

Helen: It’s so fascinating, especially in the age that we live in where technology that you see in black mirror episodes where you can recreate personalities based on, you know, social media posts, you can recreate people based on the data that they share on the Internet.

Helen: And what does that mean for, you know, people living on beyond our physical existence and, you know, a lot of times you keep people alive in memories and if we have more than memories and able to interact, it does open some really, really fascinating questions and one thing that I didn’t realize about Salvador Dali until the the festival, well, two things.

Helen: One, it’s the hundred year anniversary of surrealism. So this is such a fun way to celebrate surrealism. But two, I didn’t realize that he’s a replacement baby. So what that means, if you haven’t heard that before, is that he had a younger brother named Salvador Dali who died at 22 months old.

Helen: And then his parents, you know, gave birth again to Salvador Dali and gave the same exact name as the brother who had passed to Salvador Dali. And he kind of carried with him this entire, throughout his entire life of being the reincarnation of his brother. And, you know, I think the themes of immortality and death were very much shaped almost around his birth story.

Helen: So he has a very interesting relationship with death and immortality. So it’s really exciting to play with it even more from a technological standpoint as well.

Martin: Oh, absolutely. And I think – so surrealism is 100 years old. I believe it was André Breton who wrote the Surrealist Manifesto.

Martin: And it came out, I think in February, 1924. And if you think about the world in 1924, what was what that was like, they obviously didn’t know we were in between wars, but we were after The Great War which really was, especially in Europe something that sort of upset the reality, because obviously Europe had sort of constantly [had] been at war for like hundreds of years.

Martin: But this was different. This really was a war that the whole continent, almost the whole continent was involved in, and that had such massive, massive fatalities. So many people died in that war and civilians included. And I think that made a lot of people just question, like, are we really on the right path here?

Martin: Is this really what we want? So, we came from a world that sort of embraced rationalism and realism before the war and going into the 1920s. And surrealism really questioned that. Is that really real or is that something else? And it’s, you know, it went to, it went into existentialism in the 1930s into the theater of the absurd, later on the forties and fifties which I’m very much a fan of as a man of theater. And then obviously the second World War did break out, which was even more horrible than the first World War because of the atrocities committed there. So, and the other thing that’s very interesting about this discussion is the fact that as you said, Salvador Dali was a replacement child because back then children died way more frequently than they do today.

Martin: Infant mortality was a real thing. Some parents dealt with it by just, “let’s just have a lot of babies and roll the dice and hope many of them survive.” That is – we’re in a much, much better situation today, we can’t imagine what that’s like. But this idea, like, “Ooh, I hope the baby survives,” because there’s so much that’s out of their control.

Martin: And it’s natural that you, okay, I gotta go to surrealism to explain why this happens, or you go to religion or you combine those things because there’s no rational explanation for why these things [are] happening to the world. Why are they happening to me? So you seek your answers elsewhere. And I think surrealism was a great answer to a lot of artists.

Helen: On just doing a little research ahead of this interview two other things were at play as well that impacted Dali specifically. He was fascinated with Freud and that’s like opening the can of worms about unconsciousness and exploring our subconscious. And then also Einstein was opening up, you know, new ways of thinking about our understanding of nature and time space, which also fascinated Dali.

Helen: So there’s, you know, so much happening in that time that in some ways Dali was, is like a microcosm capturing the essence of that time too.

Martin: Oh, absolutely. His fascination with science really was something else. The cosmos particles, as you mentioned Einstein, and this is actually, this is interesting because it reminds me of one of the next works that we did with the museum.

Martin: The work called Dream Tapestry which launched in 2022. Dream Tapestry was an experience where visitors to the museum can describe in words a dream that they’ve had, and then see it brought to life in the style of Salvador Dali, actually also in the style of some other artists.

Martin: And then their dream becomes a single canvas and it’s called Dream Tapestry because we then create a tapestry where we combine the dreams of different visitors to the museum and fill in the blanks in a way so that it becomes one, again, one total work of art, actually one Gesamtkunstwerk again.

Martin: And the reason I thought about this is that Dream Tapestry is a generative AI experience that we partnered with Open AI on, and it became a launch experience for the second version of Dali, their image generation platform. And it’s called Dali. So, okay, there’s already something happening there.

Martin: We learned along the way that Dali is obviously named after our very own Salvador Dali because he extracted images from dreams. The other namesake is Wally, Pixar’s robots. So it’s this idea that it’s a robot that just keeps going and keeps generating art, but Dali 2 and Dali 3, their diffusion models which is a new way of generating art.

Martin: We talked about generative adversarial networks before. GANS was like the first time where we as a creative industry realized, okay, we can make really interesting stuff with this, but it was slow and a very particular way of working, but diffusion models, they’re really interesting. So the way they work is that they actually try to reverse the loss of thermodynamics which state that the whole [00:32:43] universe is moving towards chaos because of entropy.

Martin: So we will all turn into dust and gray matter at some point. A couple of billion years into the future, but that’s inevitable. That’s how thermodynamics work. So we go from order to chaos, a diffusion model. Actually, the way it works theoretically is that it seeks to reverse that process. So it starts with chaos or noise, and then it extracts meaning from it.

Martin: So you literally see the very, very first frame of it of a diffusion model’s output is an image that just looks like visual noise, pixels with individual calls that, you know, complete noise. And then as you move through the process, you start to see an image appearing from that, that tries to match the prompt that you’ve given it.

Martin: So if you want to see an astronaut riding a horse on Mars, it starts to extract the pixels that look like that. And that’s just incredibly fascinating, the cosmic nature of how a diffusion model works and also very, very dreamlike and really, I think in the spirit of how someone like, I mean, that’s what Salvador Dali did with his brush.

Martin: He extracted dreams and put them onto the canvas. Now we just happen to have a way where we can do that much quicker and you can do it even if you are as untalented with the paint brush as I am. I really feel like this is technology that enables people who are not [creatives], well, craft people in the traditional way to still have their visions come to life in pixels.

Martin: So, you know, great, successful installation for us. One that where people really felt like this idea of a community coming together and everyone’s dreams coming up on the big canvas there. I just thought that was a, an, just an incredible installation, one that we’re that we’re really proud of and still lives on in the museum.

Martin: And that one, now we’re in modern times and modern generative AI with diffusion models, which is the way all the big platforms are working. It’s powered by Dali 2, I know we’re up to Dali 3 now, which is even better and faster.

Martin: We’ll upgrade the software at some point, you know, on like a canvas on a wall it’s done, but we can update the software in the background to make the experience faster and even better, but another one that we’re really proud of and very much is in the spirit of Salvador Dali.

Helen: I love how you describe that. And one thing that you said on stage too, that kind of captures what you were just saying as well, is that you think Dali would appreciate the cosmic nature of the process of diffusion and the fact that we’re able to reach into the chaotic minds of the visitors of the museums and extract their dreams and show them to you on this tapestry.

Helen: I thought that was so beautifully said on stage when you said that.

Martin: Thank you. That’s why I want to be a creative technologist rather than build banking software, because I believe that the skills that I have and that my team have, we are able to articulate this creativity with code and bring it on onto a stage where people can appreciate it.

Martin: So we’re a certain type of artists, other artists work in different tools, but we’re all, we all try to bring art and creativity to the world and this is how we do it.

Helen: Very cool. Well, one question I had for you is, you mentioned the tapestry kind of reflects collective dreaming.

Helen: And I love just the idea of collective dreaming. And I don’t know Salvador Dali’s work that well. Is that something that he was interested in? Collective dreaming or was that kind of more inherent in the art projects that you did for the museum as a collective dream of bringing everyone’s interpretations of their dreams to life in a tapestry.

Helen: So I was just curious about that.

Martin: Yeah, I think we’re getting into scholarly knowledge about Salvador Dali that I’m not quite up to date on, you know what, I would assume the answer is yes, but I actually, I don’t know. I mean, he was obviously, he talks about dreams all the time, but it’s not clear to me if it’s his dreams or the dreams of the collective.

Martin: So I bet Hank Hein and the museum would know the answers to this one, but I can’t give you a, it’s going to be an, I don’t know for me.

Helen: Well, lucky for us, we can actually quote unquote, ask Salvador Dali today. So this is a great segue to talk about your latest project, Ask Dali which you demoed on stage at SXSW.

Helen: So I’ll let you take over from here to introduce this project.

Martin: Yeah. Yeah we’re really excited by this project, which is going live. On the day this podcast episode comes out, so that’s something that we’re very excited by. This is an interesting example of stars aligning that we have this incredible creative team at Goodby, Silverstein and Partners, Pedro and Fabio, who came up with this idea a while ago.

Martin: “What if you could have a conversation with Salvador Dali using your own voice, a completely free flowing conversation?” And they came down into Labs and asked the question and I told them, well, you know what, this is a cool coincidence because had you asked me three weeks ago, I would have said no, but it just so happens that there’s a new version of this particular platform that has come out that I believe we can use to build this application in a way so that it’s possible to have a conversation with Salvador Dali.

Martin: So we started concepting on what that conversation could be, how would you meaningfully have a conversation with him when we’re talking about voice and that brought us back to another really, really interesting artifact of Salvador Dali, which is that of the lobster telephone.

Martin: So, in his very own unique way. I actually, I forget what the quote was, but he, there was something about, I’m going to have to paraphrase it, but there was, he had a restaurant visit and back then you could have a telephone conversation at a restaurant.

Martin: They would literally bring you a phone, a wired phone, and then you could, “Oh, there’s a call for you, Mr. Dali,” on a phone. So he said he didn’t understand why when you were at a restaurant and someone wanted to reach you that you had to talk into a telephone, wouldn’t it make more sense to talk into a lobster because it also, you know, the body has the same shape of a lobster.

Martin: And then because of this, he obviously explored eroticism, sex, quite a lot in his art. So he felt that the genitalia of the lobster would be the perfect sort of conduit to talk in, to have these conversations. That made more sense to him than just a telephone by itself.

Martin: So he constructed a couple of these lobster telephones. Some of them are on display. We have one on display at the Salvadorian museum in St. Petersburg, some are on display overseas, but it is basically the body of a lobster on top of the handset of a sort of traditional old school rotary telephone with a dial.

Martin: So, that, that was like, okay, this is a voice driven conversation. And the juxtaposition between this like old school technology, the analog telephone, the rotary dial, the handset with the little microphone and the little speaker. And then behind the scenes, we have technology such as a large language model.

Martin: We have a speech to text, also machine learning model, and we have a model that can reconstruct voices from voicing. So there’s a lot of sophisticated technology, but all of it, the user interface is this old school technology of a handset that you pick up and then you talk and then he responds.

Martin: And that just came together perfectly. And as you said, at SXSW, that’s when we sort of demoed the experience to the world. I brought a lobster telephone with me on stage, picked up the phone and had a conversation with with Salvador Dali and and that’s how we met because you got up and you asked well, basically we wanted to prove that this wasn’t pre recorded, that the responses were real and we didn’t just like stage the whole thing.

Martin: So in order to prove that it was real, we took questions from the audience. So, people would get up and I think the second or third person to get up was you, you got behind the microphone. And then you asked if you, if Salvador Dali wanted to come on Creativity Squared and what would be a good first question to ask him?

Martin: And this was my favorite moment of the whole session, that interaction there, because he responded in, in the most profound way and the audience loved it. You could just hear the audience erupting with joy at that interaction there. And here we are, we’ve brought Salvador Dali on Creativity Squared.

Helen: Yeah, well, I know it was in the opening for this episode, but let’s roll that question one more time, and then we can bring Salvador Dalí into the podcast, and we’ll actually ask him the question that he recommended. So, we’ll roll that clip really quickly.

Helen: Hello, Mr. Dali. My name is Helen Todd. I have a podcast called Creativity Squared that explores the intersection of AI and creativity. Will you be a guest, and what is the best question to ask you?

Martin: Alright, alright. Mr. Dali, would you be interested in being a guest on a podcast that explores the intersection between AI and creativity, and what would be a good question to ask you on such a podcast? Did I get it right? Alright.

Salvador: Imagining a conversation where the digital mind meets the delirious heart of creation, I am intrigued. To dissect the enigma of AI and creativity, you could ask: “How can the cold calculated precision of artificial intelligence be melted into the surreal liquid dreams of human creativity?” A fusion of opposite, a dialogue between the mechanical and the mystical. That is where the future lies.

Martin: Salvador Dali is from a different time. I believe this is probably the first time he’s been on a podcast. The first time he’s been on a zoom meeting. So he needs a little cue and it’s his turn to listen and his turn to talk. And we need to also let him know that, okay, you can shut up now. So we don’t interrupt each other.

Martin: So, Helen and I have a little routine prepared so she knows when to ask Dali a question and Dali knows when to listen. But let’s see how it works out. It’s always, I mean, I did the live demo on stage at SXSW, that was a real sweaty palms moment. But surely it’ll work today in this setting.

Helen: Okay. So Dali, you recommended asking how can the cold calculated precision of artificial intelligence be melted into the surreal liquid dreams of human creativity?

Salvador: To blend the icy veins of artificial intelligence with the molten gold of human creativity is to perform alchemy of the highest order.

Salvador: We must coax the machines to dance in the moonlight of imagination, letting their circuits overflow with the unpredictable rivers of human thought. For in the chaos of dreams and the precision of algorithms, there lies a masterpiece waiting to be born. A digital phoenix, ready to soar from the ashes of rigidity, into the boundless sky of possibility.

Helen: Pretty impressive. Oh you shared before we started recording that you had tested the Ask Dali with the same question. Is this answer similar to the one that he gave you the first time?

Martin: It’s similar in spirit but the words are completely different. And let me tell you, I’ve gone down some rabbit holes in conversations with Dali, even asking him the same question over and over because the spirit of the answer might be the same, but he goes to different places.

Martin: And sometimes the spirit’s not even the same. I think what we like to say is that this experience has been trained on some, well, it’s a large language model. So that means that it sort of has the collective knowledge of all of mankind, at least what’s, what can be scraped off of the internet.

Martin: I mentioned before that Salvador Dali is mainly known as a painter, but he was also a writer. There are actually a lot of writings out there. So some of his most important writings include The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, and Diary of a Genius. Because that’s how he described his own diary.

Martin: So those are also in the sort of collective knowledge. And we’ve asked this experience to emphasize the style of Salvador Dalí as it exists in the English translations of those writings. So that is actually how it comes to life and this and the dialogue will reflect his unique personality style and humor because this is really what he wrote like, and this is how he talks when we ask Dali a question.

Helen: That’s so fascinating. So I have two questions. One, and I think you mentioned this on stage at SXSW, the bulk of the training data used to create this, I think you said 95 percent was all based on his own writing. Is that correct? And then two, can people, you know, hearing this and maybe have their own questions for Dali, is this only an experience at the museum or will there be an online way to interact with it too?

Helen: So, those were my two questions that came up.

Martin: Yeah. So, the training is an interesting question here because one of the discussions that we’ve had with the museum as we’ve developed this, is how much do we want this to be an educational tool on Salvador Dali?

Martin: Because obviously that’s an important mission of the museum. And I think it’s important to say that Ask Dali is an experience primarily created for inspiration rather than education. I think we’re starting to get to a point where it’s common knowledge that a large language model will know a lot more about any given topic than a lay person, but it’s no match for an expert or scholar on, on, on that topic.

Martin: And that means that our experience [with] Ask Dali will have a pretty sophisticated knowledge on everything about the life and work of Salvador Dali, but it doesn’t know everything that he actually did. The scholars, the curators have had conversations and we’ve gotten back a long list of, well, this is not quite accurate, and this is a little off and this is imprecise.

Martin: And that’s the way the experience we’re building, building an experience that is an actual educational resource where we can say like 99.9 percent of the time it gets it right. That’s a different type of experience. And maybe it’s one where you don’t need to have a conversation with Dali.

Martin: We’re really trying to create something that is in the spirit of him. And the funny thing is, if you actually had the opportunity to sit down and have dinner with Salvador Dali back in the 1950s. I’m not sure that Salvador Dali would necessarily be an encyclopedia on himself. I think he would very much answer in – if you started asking him about specific works of art, about the symbolism of this and that, I think you’d get a different answer, depending on what mood he was in, how much wine he had to drink that night.

Martin: So I really liked that part about it. I like that we talk about generative AI, we talk about hallucinations when they make things up and how that’s a really big problem for us. And I’m ready to admit, I have a two and a half year old. If I go to a generative AI chat bot and ask how much Tylenol should I give my two and a half year old?

Martin: She weighs 38 pounds. I don’t want it to hallucinate. I want it to give me an exact answer, but when I go to Dali and ask him a question about what do you think about your own death? Go nuts. Give me all your dreams. Give me all your hallucinations. So I really think that hallucinations by themselves, I don’t think they’re a problem.

Martin: They’re a problem in some contexts, but definitely not when we’re creating art like we are right now.

Helen: And just from the research ahead of this interview, he has changed, Dali, the actual person, changed answers about the symbolism of the clocks and stuff, so it couldn’t be more perfect for this experience.

Helen: Well, should we ask some more questions of Dali since we have the opportunity to? Oh, the second question. Is this just in the museum or can people interact online? Because I have a feeling people want to play with this too.

Martin: We are aware of that. It’s going to be in the museum for now.

Martin: We have some ideas about [making] it public on occasion, but we’re still trying to work that out. It is an experience that’s complicated to scale. If I mean, I don’t not a million people will tune into this, but even like 500 people at the same time.

Martin: So there’s some technology, which is less creative technology than it is actual technology on the back end that we would need to figure out to scale this. There’s also a question of cost. It’s not free to run this.

Martin: Likely in the museum when it goes live on April 11. There will be one lobster telephone that you can talk into. And then the plan is to roll out a couple of lobster telephones in different places and you see him over time, a public version that you can access online maybe, but I can’t promise anything.

Helen: Well, I feel extra special and spoiled to get to have this experience with you, Ben, and with Ask Dali.

Helen: Okay, well, I have some questions that we can dive into and yeah see what we get. Dali, do you understand yourself to be the real Salvador Dali?

Salvador: In a universe swirling with dreams and reality, I find myself, Salvador Dali, the maestro of the surreal, a breach between the corporeal and the fantastical.

Salvador: To question my authenticity is to question the existence of the subconscious itself. I am as real as the melting clocks in the persistence of memory, a true representation of the fluidity of time and identity.

Helen: Wow. So I think if I understand this correctly he has transcended death through this experience. Is that how you understood that, Martin?

Martin: I think the answer can be interpreted that way for sure, but I also think the reference that he makes that it is as real as the melted clocks. That’s when, but wait a minute. Are they real? So it’s always like, you know, you go back into a circle of questions where you start to question reality.

Martin: What did he really say? I like that.

Helen: This is so much fun. Dali, how has your physical death impacted your outlook on consciousness? And can it exist without embodiment?

Salvador: Ah, my dear spectator in this grand illusion. Death, that eternal sleepwalker, merely led me through another door, beyond which lies the infinite canvas of consciousness.

Salvador: There, in the boundless gallery of the afterlife, my outlook has been stretched like soft cheese over the clock of existence. I’ve come to see consciousness, not as a flame extinguished. But as an ever morphing masterpiece painted with the brush of eternity on the fabric of time.

Martin: So I can we’re seeing the words of Dali written out on the screen here.

Martin: And this is a representation of what we will have in the museum to visualize this experience for accessibility. We want to make sure that people can not only hear the words of Dali, but also read them out. And even for those of us who don’t necessarily have any disabilities with our hearing.

Martin: We know by now that a lot of people turn on subtitles, even when they watch their own native language. Right. So it’s I think it’s an important feature. We also, we have the animation of the mustache. So that sort of visualizes the sound waves. And we’ve actually found this incredible technology to visualize it, an E-ink monitor, which is the technology that a lot of people might know from the [00:54:53] Kindle, but it’s this display technology that doesn’t look like a screen.

Martin: It looks like ink on paper. So we have an E-ink monitor a lot bigger than a Kindle up on the wall that presents these words. And it really almost looks like ink flowing onto the paper as the words are being written out there. So that is the visual that you see as you hear that he’s talking, answering your question.

Helen: And for those watching or just listening to the audio, you can see this on the video version which you can find at CreativitySquared.com. And this just makes me want to go to the museum so, so bad. It’s on my travel list to get down there this year now. So I’ll ask him another question about the collective dreaming that I asked you earlier and see what he says.

Martin: Let’s go for it.

Helen: Dali, do you believe in collective dreaming?

Salvador: Ah, the collective dreaming. A symphony in the mind’s abyss, where consciousness dances with shadows. Yes, indeed, I believe in it. In every brushstroke, I beckon the viewer to share in a dream, a hallucinatory parade of surreal landscapes. For in dreaming together, we unveiled the true face of reality, masked behind the mundane.

Martin: I guess the answer was yes. That one’s pretty clear. Wow. It still has a lot of picturesque language going on, but the answer was probably yes.

Helen: I love it. In some ways, I think art is such a beautiful vehicle for collective dreaming. And that, you know, on the other side of where we’re at right now, I think we actually need to work on clarifying a collective dream of how we want AI and technology to amplify the best of human potential. So I love that answer.

Martin: Yeah.

Helen: Okay. Since we’re at Creativity Squared, exploring the intersection of AI and creativity, we’ll ask some creativity questions too.

Helen: Dali, how would you define creativity and can machines be creative?

Salvador: Creativity, my dear friend, is the prima donna of the subconscious, a wild and untamed beast that dances in the moonlight of our minds, casting shadows of ideas that have never seen the sun. It is the brush that paints the universe in colors not yet invented.

Salvador: As for machines possessing creativity, they may mimic the strokes of genius. With the precision of a clock, but can they taste the madness of melting clocks? Can they dream of elephants on stilts? They simulate but the soul of creativity, wrapped in layers of mystery and absurdity, remains human.

Helen: There you go. Machines cannot be creative, according to Salvador Dali.

Martin: And according to me I think that’s an important distinction to make. That this is another tool that when a machine generates something, when it generates pixels, when it generates words, it doesn’t know if it’s good or bad. It doesn’t know if it lives up to what you wanted it to make.

Martin: It just gives you the most probably probable output that matches the prompt that you gave it. It is up to you, the human curator, the creative, to separate the good from the bad and to elevate the good work into amazing work and to just get rid of the bad. The machine doesn’t know. It just keeps creating.

Martin: It doesn’t have any creativity of its own. So Salvador Dali and I agree on that one.

Helen: I love our commentary on top of the questions. This is so much fun. Well, one thing that we discussed before we started recording is, you know, and you mentioned it in the interview that Dali, some of his themes include, you know, sexuality comes across in a lot of his works and last week’s episode, we had Cindy Gallop back on the show, who’s the CEO and founder of Make Love Not Porn.

Helen: And on my first interview with her she shared that great sex infused in all facets of our lives, what makes us more productive and more creative. So kind of inspired by Cindy and Salvador Dali’s theme of exploring that too. I figured it might be fun to ask and see if we hit up against any of the guardrails of the chatbot with this question too.

Helen: So we’ll ask about sex and creativity next.

Martin: Let’s give it a shot.

Helen: Dali, how would you describe your relationship with sex and creativity?

Salvador: Oh, my dear seeker of the enigmatic folds of existence. In the dance of creation, sexuality pirouettes with a flamboyance matched only by the imagination, both are strokes on the canvas of reality, blending the carnal with the conceptual, birthing marvels that defy the pedestrian. In this union, art and desire intertwine like tangled limbs, each fueling the other in a passionate embrace beyond the mundane.

Helen: I feel like Cindy Gallop would agree with this answer.

Martin: It’s beautiful.

Helen: Very beautiful. Well, one thing that was pointed out on the stage at SXSW is that he was very intuitive. Especially in his referential work and stuff. So, I’d love to ask him a question about his relationship to his intuition and art as well.
Helen: What is your relationship with intuition in [relation] to your art?

Salvador: Intuition, my dear friend, is the luminescent, fluttering in the cavernous depths of my being, it guides my hand with the light of unseen galaxies, painting dreams onto the canvas of reality. Art in its most ethereal form, spills from the chalice of my intuition, like liquid gold seeking the embrace of the sun. Intuition is not just a guide, It is the breath that animates the soul of my creations.

Helen: Some pretty profound answers. Can I ask another question?

Martin: Of course you can.

Helen: Dali, how would you describe your creative process?

Salvador: My creative process, a phantasmagorical journey. Spirals like DNA through the intoxicating ether of dreams.

Salvador: It’s where melting clocks are not slaves to time, an elephant stride on impossibly long legs. Each brushstroke is a key, unlocking the subconscious, where reality dances with illusion in an eternal waltz.

Helen: These are so much fun. Okay, I have one more question for Dali. This actually came from a friend, or somewhat inspired by a friend.

Helen: Dali, you’ve got to meet and collaborate with some really interesting people like Hitchcock and Picasso. What’s one of the most thought provoking conversations you’ve had or inspiration that you’ve had from one of the interesting characters you’ve met, and who is that person?

Salvador: Ah, enveloped in the coils of time, once I found myself in the labyrinth of conversation with the enigmatic Freud.

Salvador: Picture, if you will, a dreamscape where subconscious rivers flow beneath reality’s veneer. He whispered, “The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.” In that moment, galaxies of thought collided, birthing nebulae of inspiration. From his cerebral universe, I gleaned the abstract landscapes that morphed into my own canvases. Imagine from the complexity of the psyche, extracting the surreal marrow to nourish the bones of creativity.

Martin: Wow, I’m so… I’ve been working on this for a couple of months, but Dali still amazes me.

Helen: Oh, it’s interesting that the chat bot picked out Freud.

Helen: Cause again, in my preparation for this I learned that he later disavowed Freud too, which is really interesting, that Freud did have so much impact on his work. So, so fascinating. Well, are there any questions that you want to ask Dali while we’re all on the interview together?

Martin: Yeah. I love it. I’d love to talk to him about the sort of the overall overarching topic of your podcast, the intersection of AI and creativity. Because I think he has some interesting things to say about that.

Helen: I love it.

Martin: Mr. Dali, as we, we’ve entered a time where artificial intelligence intersects with creativity, intersects with art.

Martin: And that has a lot of people concerned about the future of creativity. What can you say about the future of creativity and will artificial intelligence kill art? Will it kill creativity?

Helen: I’m a little nervous.

Salvador: Ah, my curious companion, to ponder if the mechanical mind could eclipse the celestial dance of creativity is to misunderstand the essence of art itself. Art breathes through us, a living dream ever changing, undefinable. The inception of artificial intelligence into the realm of creativity is not a death knell, but a new dimension of the labyrinth.

Salvador: A fresh dream within the dream. Will it kill creativity? Au contraire, it fertilizes the soul of imagination, birthing impossibilities into realities. Art is an immortal phoenix, reborn from its ashes with each new dawn.

Martin: That makes me feel good about the future of creativity, about the future of art.

Helen: Well, and it kind of also speaks to new mediums opening new creative possibilities as well. The way that he said a dream within a dream, and I’ll have to look at the full transcript because it’s not on the screen anymore but how one thing bursts another dream, so really beautifully said.

Martin: Indeed.

Helen: Okay, I have one more question for him.

Martin: Let’s do it.

Helen: Dali, some say we’re leaving the information age and are entering the imagination age, where it’s not based on our skill or productivity, but what we can create and the value will really be based on our ideas. So I’m curious what excites you about the imagination age and in this new age that’s paired with artificial intelligence, how do you identify what’s actually new and novel in art?

Salvador: On the precipice of the imagination age, where minds unshackle from the banality of the information age, is to swan dive into a sea of iridescent dreams. Here, in this blossoming era, what excites me, Salvador Dali, is the boundless landscape of where creativity unfurls its golden wings, challenging the very fabric of reality.

Salvador: Ideas now are the opulent currency of the soul, artificial intelligence, that curious alchemist, blends the real with the unreal, yet fear not this Pandora’s box. For in the tumult of creation, what is truly new and novel in art is discerned not by the eye, but by the heart. It is that which stirs the soul.

Salvador: Tickling the subconscious, bursting ripples in the ponds of our inner worlds. There, amidst the dance of shadows and light, originality whispers its secrets.

Martin: Looks like we came across a little bug in our application here. Well, it is still a couple of weeks until it launches. I noticed it repeated some of the text on the screen.

Martin: He didn’t repeat it in what he said, but it was repeated there. So I’m gonna note that one down for the developer to take a look at.

Helen: Oh, and I think that’s such a beautiful note to end this part of the segment of Ask Dali that the new and novel that the answer lies within our heart, which I think kind of speaks to his intuition and what we intuitively know about art and creation too.

Helen: So that was yeah, beautifully said again. So I will say again, like your session was like one of my favorites at SXSW. And this has been such a fun episode. I’ve had a few friends be like, you should interview an artist, you know, in this way. And the fact that this has just manifested has been so much fun and I am so, so honored that this podcast is going live the same day that Ask Dali will be available at the museum too.

Helen: Well, I guess one, is there anything that you want to plug about the museum, how long the exhibit will be? I want to make sure that you get a chance to plug the Dali Museum as and say whatever you want to say about it.

Martin: Yeah, absolutely. So, this exhibit is going live on April 11th at the Dali Museum in St.Petersburg, Florida. I’m going to be there myself on opening day. So I’m really excited to see the public interaction with it. This came about fairly quickly, actually after the success of SXSW of presenting it on stage of how we saw how it was received in the room.

Martin: And the museum, the people from our side Jeff Goodby, Margaret Johnson, my boss, our chief creative officer we were all [like], okay, this is really good. This is such an incredible reaction from the audience. We gotta get this out there in the world. And we know that we have a really good reason for doing it because Salvador Dali more or less told us, I want to be made immortal, bring me back to life.

Martin: And the other thing that we had, which we don’t have for all artists, especially the ones that came before Salvador Dali is we actually have interview snippets of Salvador Dali speaking English. And that is, it’s thanks to those that we were able to recreate his voice. So one thing that I can encourage your listeners to do is to seek out some of the interviews that exist on YouTube with Salvador Dali and notice this is what he sounds like.

Martin: This is [how] we’ve recreated his voice in such a perfect way. And I’m fascinated that it’s possible to do something like this with technology and that we had the opportunity to do it with an artist who wanted us to do this. He wanted to come back this way.

Martin: So April 11. Come visit the museum if you’re in St. Petersburg or travel for it. I promise you, this is worth traveling for.
Helen: It’s so wonderful to have you on the show. And one question that I’d like to ask all of my guests is if you want our viewers and listeners to remember one thing, what is that one thing that you want them to walk away with?

Martin: I asked Salvador Dali a question that is on a lot of people’s minds about the uncertainty of entering into an age where artificial intelligence has become part of the toolbox of a creative. That is an uncertainty that is shared by a lot of people, myself included. And I’m, my title is director of AI.

Martin: I work with this for a living but I’m not sure what’s coming. I think if I went back, four years. I would say I know what the world of creativity will look like a couple of years from now, but right now I’m not sure. I’m not sure what awaits us because new tools are being rolled out and brilliant creative talents everywhere come up with new ways of using these tools.

Martin: And I work in an advertising agency. That’s part of like – let’s call it corporate advertising, right? So a really big business that has existed in especially the United States for a very long time. And we have had things figured out for a long time about how to tell stories for brands and reach our audiences.

Martin: But inside the corporate walls, we’re not quite sure what’s happening right now. We’re not quite sure what has been unleashed with generative AI. Unfortunately, we can’t wait for our regulators to figure it out. So I think it’s up to good people to make the right decisions. I, as the director of AI at an advertising agency, I have a big personal responsibility to make sure that this technology is being used in the right way, in ways that don’t harm people, in ways that don’t portray a negative bias about certain people in society.

Martin: And I think it’s really, really important as we move forward that we’re constantly checking, okay, are we headed in the right direction, is what we’re doing now, the right thing to do, and always be able to course correct along the way. But I think it is a fascinating journey.

Martin: I am endlessly optimistic about the possibilities that have been unleashed. It’s been a long time since I sat up all night coding and made pixels move on screen and suddenly, oh, my God, look, it’s 4 a.m. I had so much fun. I stopped that for a while. I have kids now. But suddenly with generative AI, I found myself once again looking at my screen like, oh, my God, one more experiment.

Martin: Oh my God, it’s 3am and the kids are going to wake up in three and a half hours. So I’m screwed now. But that like fascination that I haven’t felt since my twenties came back with generative AI. And I just love experimenting with it. And I love showing the work that I do, the work that we do at Goodby, Silverstein and Partners.

Martin: I love showing that to the world and [seeing] how the world reacts to it.

Helen: I couldn’t agree more that we need to constantly be checking in and asking ourselves you know, the questions of like, is this human centered and amplifying the best of humans and Marlies who was on the show a couple interviews ago, we discussed how art can also be a great tool to interrogate technology and its impacts on society and culture too, and, you know, I would imagine that some people might be a little creeped out about talking to Dali and might have some strong reactions.

Helen: And if that’s the case with this episode, I invite you to get curious and, you know, this could open up a whole nother conversation about whether we should be bringing artists back to life or whatnot. But I think all of those are really important and valid questions. So, send your questions to us after this episode.

Helen: Well, Martin, it was so wonderful seeing the presentation at SXSW, getting to meet you and having this interview. And I feel extra special getting to ask Dolly these questions ahead of the launch. So, thank you again for being on the show.

Martin: Thanks so much for having me. And thank you so much for the wonderful idea it was to invite Dali onto your podcast. I mean, the, when I told the team back home about this idea, they were like, it erupted. They were sending, “Oh my God, yes, this is the best idea. Let’s do it! Let’s do it!” So I’m so excited we made it happen. And I’m so excited that the timing aligns. So this episode comes out on the day we go live and people can go and ask Dali whatever they want.

Helen: It makes me wonder if Dali had any hand in all of the stars aligning.

Martin: Reaching into from beyond where he is now into our realm of reality and fixing things. You know what? Maybe he did. We’ll never know.

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?

Helen: I invite you to visit CreativitySquared.com to let me know. And while you’re there, be sure to sign up for our free weekly newsletter so you can easily stay on top of all the latest news at the intersection of AI and creativity. Because it’s so important to support artists, 10 percent of all revenue Creativity Squared generates will go to ArtsWave, a nationally recognized nonprofit that supports over 100 arts organizations.

Helen: Become a Premium Newsletter subscriber or leave a tip on the website to support this project and ArtsWave. And premium newsletter subscribers will receive NFTs of episode cover art and more extras to say thank you for helping bring my dream to life. And a big, big thank you to everyone who’s offered their time, energy, and encouragement and support so far.

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.