Ep74. Taryn Southern: A.I. & Creators of the Future

Ep74. A.I. & Creators of the Future: Explore How GenAI is Transforming World-Building, Immersive Experiences, and Storytelling with OG A.I. Artist Taryn Southern

With a front-row seat to the future, meet Taryn Southern, a creative technologist, pioneering artist, strategist, and speaker whose work explores the intersection of emerging technology and human potential.

As an early content creator, she uploaded her first video to YouTube in 2007 — and it went viral. Ten years and 750 million views later, Taryn has produced more than 1,500 pieces of digital content for networks like Conde Naste, The Today Show, MTV, Snapchat, and Maker Studios. She’s written for Business Insider and TechCrunch, and served as a host for Discovery Channel’s #1 late night show. A three-time Streamy Awards nominee, her work has been featured in Billboard, Fast Company, Wired, Vanity Fair, Harvard Business Review, and more.

Fast-forward to 2017, Taryn released I AM AI, the world’s first A.I.-composed pop album; then in 2019, she directed and produced a Tribeca award-winning documentary on the future of A.I. and the human brain titled I AM HUMAN, followed by creating an award-winning Google VR series. In 2020, she became one of the earliest content creators to create an A.I.-avatar of herself.

Since 2021, Taryn has served as Chief Storyteller at Blackrock Neurotech, a leading implantable neurotechnology company, where she launched the world’s first Brain Computer Interface museum and oversaw a communications strategy for two successful funding rounds totaling over $230M+. She is passionate about helping people use A.I. and emerging tech to amplify creativity and wellbeing.

Today’s conversation explores the evolution of A.I.-assisted creativity, from Taryn’s groundbreaking A.I.-composed album to her current meditative album in development that celebrates the human experience. We dive into her work deconstructing storytelling taxonomy and building custom A.I. tools, while examining how world-building, immersive experiences, and storytelling are transforming through emerging technologies.

Taryn also shares her fascinating work with brain-computer interfaces and her vision for how technology might reshape our physical and digital worlds. From questioning our relationship with productivity to contemplating a future with more “spaciousness,” this episode offers fresh perspectives that challenge conventional thinking.

What are Taryn’s predictions about the future and why will she be one of the first in line for a humanoid robot? Keep reading or listen in to find out!

A Tale of Two Albums: How A.I. Music Production Has Evolved Since 2018

As a kid growing up in Wichita, KS, Taryn says she became enchanted with how computers offered a window to an outside world full of possibilities.

The enchantment never dimmed. She wrote music for the first time using a computer rather than an instrument, which she says was an “omen” of her later success in creating original music with artificial intelligence.

Taryn’s journey with A.I.-composed music showcases both the evolution of A.I. music tools and her own artistic vision.

She was exposed to early A.I. music tools during her time as a Google Artist in Residence around 2017 and quickly became fascinated with the idea of “coding creativity.” She created what would become the world’s first A.I.-composed pop album to accompany a VR experience she was developing. In the process, she pushed early music generation tools like Google Magenta to their creative limits.

“I was really just figuring out how to kind of break the [older] music tools and push them to their limits. There was still a lot of human input needed to actually make the music sound palatable.”

Taryn Southern

Fast forward to 2024, and Taryn is working on a totally different kind of album — one that aims to celebrate the human experience through meditative, cinematic soundscapes. The contrast between her two A.I.-assisted music projects reveals just how far the technology has come. Where her first album required extensive back and forth to shape the machine learning model’s output, today’s tools offer “incredible production capabilities” right from the start.

But even the more advanced generative A.I. tools she works with now aren’t without their own creative challenges. “There’s some interesting limitations in the fact that you’re sort of handed a fantastic song on the first go,” she said. “What is my role as a creative in this if I don’t get to have some sort of fine-tune control?”

She says that her solution has been to focus on creating deeply personal pieces that leverage the strengths of A.I. while exploring the textures of human existence.

“What I’m trying to do here is show people you don’t actually have to have a human mind behind these tools to create something beautiful.”

Taryn Southern

The new album she’s working on marks a departure from the tech-focused sounds of her earlier work. Instead of emphasizing the technology aspect, she’s using artificial intelligence to create deeply human compositions featuring cellos and cinematic arrangements. Drawing on recent research about music’s impact on the brain, Taryn envisions this project as a “meditative visual album” that will take listeners on a journey through “pure joy and despair” and all the colors of human experience. As she puts it, “It’s kind of like a love story to the human experience.”

Deconstructing Storytelling in the A.I. Age

Taryn says that working with artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed how she approaches storytelling. Where she once relied purely on creative instinct, she now approaches storytelling like an elegant formula for informing and entertaining.

“The way that I think about the world and my work has changed so much as a result of adopting A.I. into my workflow.”

Taryn Southern

The data behind her formula live in spreadsheets containing “years and years of the storytelling experience.” This methodical approach allows her to organize narrative elements by intent, objective, and format; creating frameworks she can use to fuel brainstorming sessions with language models. She’s even built custom A.I. tools that help her engage with her storytelling formulas in novel ways.

She also notes how the digital age and commoditization of our attention is reshaping story structure itself. The traditional hero’s journey, with its slow build to climax, is giving way to new forms driven by the demands of digital attention spans.

While she initially developed her A.I.-powered storytelling tools for personal use and her work in implantable neurotechnology, Taryn says she’s considering making them more widely available. She envisions an “expert storyteller” A.I. model into which other teams can feed their own knowledge bases. While noting that the system would need pressure testing, particularly for industries requiring scientific rigor, she said that the possibility of helping others harness artificial intelligence for storytelling could be an intriguing project for the future.

Digital Worlds and Physical Reality

The future of world-building with A.I. has Taryn excited about democratizing creativity.

“From a production standpoint, world-building will change everything. It will enable small creators to make that project they always wanted to bring to life. There’s no more excuses or waiting for a gatekeeper to say yes and write you a check.”

Taryn Southern

Working with a community of A.I. filmmakers, Taryn is already exploring how these tools can be pushed to their limits. Though she says that current workflows still have their challenges, she can see where the technology is heading. However, she cautions that this democratization of creation will lead to a “really noisy time” where success will depend on mastering fundamental storytelling skills.

The conversation turns philosophical when discussing the relationship between digital and physical realities. “I would hope that if our digital universes were simply an extension of our imagination, that we would be a bit more creative,” Taryn reflects. She notes that our online worlds often mirror existing capitalistic systems rather than embracing the full potential of human imagination, wagering that digital worlds would be prettier and more interesting if they weren’t so closely modeled after the current socioeconomic structures and incentives of our physical world.

The same observation extends to our physical environment as well. “When we walk down the street, we accept the billboard and the sort of ugly parking lot and whatever else has manifested in our physical reality… if we were to recreate human reality from the ground up and optimize for all these things that we knew would be beneficial for our health, for our mental well-being, for aesthetics — how different would the world look?” With A.I.’s ability to manifest our imaginations more readily, Taryn hopes we might move “much more quickly into a world that all of us imagine is so much better than the one that we have today.”

As these digital and physical spaces become increasingly intertwined, Taryn emphasizes the importance of maintaining our connection to embodied experience. The challenge lies in harnessing artificial intelligence to enhance rather than replace our fundamental human experience — creating spaces, both digital and physical, that truly serve our well-being and creative potential.

Predictions: Robots, Reclaiming Time, and the Future of Work

When asked about the future, Taryn’s predictions come fast and confident.

“I am willing to bet that most people will have an autonomous robot assistant in their home in five years. If I have the option of spending $30,000 on a car versus having an assistant that’s keeping my space clean and cooking healthy food for me, it’s not even a question in my mind.”

Taryn Southern

According to Taryn, this wave of A.I.-powered assistance in the form of agents and humanoid robots could eliminate many of life’s daily friction points. From dealing with insurance companies and medical appointments to handling customer service calls and household chores, she sees artificial intelligence taking over the tasks that merely help us survive, freeing us to focus on activities that help us thrive.

Taryn warns, though, that the gift of more time could also feel like a curse. A dramatic shift in how we spend our time could create an abundance of “spaciousness” in our lives — a prospect Taryn believes might make some people uncomfortable or listless. She suggests that we’ll need to come up with new ways of finding meaning and purpose when we can no longer define ourselves by checking items off our to-do lists.

Looking at the broader economic picture, Taryn predicts we’ll witness significant changes to traditional work structures. She believes the combination of A.I. advancement and evolving employment landscapes will force societies to reconsider the standard workweek. Rather than maintaining current schedules with fewer employed workers, she suggests we might see a widespread shift to three or four-day workweeks to maintain broader employment. Given the positive results already seen in European studies of shortened workweeks, she’s confident that the traditional five-day schedule will become obsolete within the next three to five years.

Better to Feel Human Than Feel Special

For her final thoughts, Taryn offers a provocative perspective that challenges our fundamental assumptions about human uniqueness. Drawing a parallel to how Galileo’s discovery that Earth wasn’t the center of the universe transformed human consciousness, she suggests that artificial intelligence might offer a similarly humbling — and ultimately freeing — revelation.

“Seeing this other intelligent form, regardless of how you want to relate to it, and whether or not you believe it ever has a possibility of being conscious, just seeing the intelligence come out of it certainly makes me feel less special as a human, and I’m so okay with that.”

Taryn Southern

Taryn suggests we’ve built our human systems around the idea of individual uniqueness and special talents, using these beliefs to construct our identities and create meaning in our lives. But maybe, she suggests, that’s not the point at all. In an age of artificial intelligence, we might find liberation in moving beyond the pressure to be special and instead focus simply on being — on fully experiencing both the challenges and the beauty of human existence.

It’s a fitting conclusion from someone who has spent decades exploring the intersection of human potential and emerging technology. As A.I. continues to reshape our world, Taryn’s work reminds us that the most profound changes might not be in what we can do, but in how we understand ourselves and our place in an increasingly intelligent universe.

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Thank you, Taryn, for joining us on this special episode of Creativity Squared.

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