Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
An artist's perspective on AI, with Agnieszka Pilat
35 Plays4 months ago
It feels like AI can now write anything for us and create anything for us. In some respects it’s exciting, but it’s also scary, and it raises a depressing question: will AI kill creativity?
There are few people better placed to answer that question than Polish-American artist Agnieszka Pilat. Agnieszka is the Silicon Valley elite’s favorite artist. Intelligencer magazine has called her the court painter of the potentate’s of Silicon Valley, including Elon Musk, who has twice invited her onsite for an artist residency at SpaceX.
She is best known for her work with Spots: dog-like robots designed by Boston Dynamics, which are more usually used by mining companies or militaries than by artists. In her own words, “Machines are humanity’s children. I am just giving them a page in a family album.”
Get in touch with Cortico-X here.
Follow Cortico-X on LinkedIn here.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Cordico X and Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Cordico X is an experience-led transformation business that partners with clients and technology companies to drive digital acceleration. We are experience activists, passionate about elevating everyday human experiences through the belief that what's best for people is what's best for an organization. Reach out to us for a chat. A link is in the show notes.
00:00:35
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Speaking from Experience from CorticoX, where we speak to the people with experience of experience. I'm Will Kingston. Last week, just before we posted a teaser to LinkedIn for the latest episode, a notification asked me whether I would like my prose rewritten with the help of AI. I clicked no rather indignantly. The day before, I was considering reaching out to our creative gurus to redesign the podcast cover, only to be reminded that ChatGPT could do the job in a fraction of the time. Heck, I'm sure an artificial rendering of my voice could take over hosting duties entirely. In some respects, it's exciting, but it's also scary, and it raises a depressing question. Will technology kill creativity?
Meet Agnieszka Palat, the Artist with a Robotic Edge
00:01:29
Speaker
There are few people better placed to answer that question than my guest today, Polish-American artist Agnieszka Palat. Agnieszka is the Silicon Valley elite's favourite artist. Intelligencer magazine has called her the court painter of the potentates of Silicon Valley, including Elo Musk, who has twice invited her on site for an artist residency at SpaceX. She is best known for her work with Spots, dog-like robots designed by Boston Dynamics, which are usually used by mining companies or militaries than by artists. Three Spots just featured in a four-month residency at her exhibition, Keterobota, at the NGV Triennial in Melbourne, Australia. In her own words,
00:02:16
Speaker
Machines are humanity's children. I am just giving them a page in a family album. Agnieszka, welcome to Speaking from Experience. Hi Will, it's my pleasure to be here. It's my pleasure to have you on. We will get to a discussion on technology and creativity and whether they can in fact coexist or even perhaps enable each other. But before we do, you have a fascinating story and I want to start there. You were born in communist Poland in 1973. Tell me, what was that like? And perhaps how has it influenced your worldview today?
From Communism to Creativity: Palat's Journey
00:02:53
Speaker
Yes, so I was born when Poland was deep communism. As we know, the wall the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. So I'm very privileged in the sense that I think I saw ah how humans operate under extreme repressive system. And then what happens when you know freedom comes and people were just allowed to flourish and make their own decisions. So Poland had a very good transition and within five years, I would say it was a very different country. And not only country as per people, but also technology changed very fast. In fact, I would say that the first thing most people in Poland did when the Berlin Wall came down was to buy a Western car.
00:03:42
Speaker
And the Western car in Poland ah became a tool for people to build build businesses. It was very important, but it was
The Influence of Patronage on Art and Culture
00:03:51
Speaker
beyond that. It was truly a hope for a better future. You must have been a creative child. Did growing up in that system innately repress your creative instincts? How did you manage to maintain that with that system around you? I think growing up um in communism, we learned the power of image and how much image influences us. So I've been very, I still till today, I'm rather rather ah suspicious of art in that sense, because art often is really a discussion of power structures in society. And very often, you know it's perceived as a natural individual form of expression, but it's truly, it's really not. Because for artists to thrive, you need to have,
00:04:41
Speaker
um you know patrons and patrons provide the means because we have to eat two artists and we have to pay for the studio and so on. ah So patronage is the way of influencing culture overtly or covertly. because yeah we always work for someone else. we don't The pure artist, I think it's a it's a bit of a myth, a pure artist that just expresses themselves out of need. ah Because ultimately, if the business of art doesn't matter, you cannot operate. And of course, Michelangelo was the best in business, having this huge commission from the most powerful structures back then, which was the Catholic Church.
00:05:22
Speaker
heard you in an interview before call yourself a propaganda artist. What do you mean by that?
AI and Art: A Glimpse into Future Legacy
00:05:27
Speaker
Yeah, I'm being a bit, ah of course, this is a yeah but um it's a bit of a joke, but then it's also not because again, patronage really decides what's being created and how history is being remembered also. So by saying that in my, you know, the big concept of my work is that I would think that when artificial intelligence does actually become sentient, it really truly has agency.
00:05:58
Speaker
I imagine my dream is that intelligent machines of the future come to a museum and they look at the work I created with my robots and they look at that work and they think, oh, this was created by our ancestors. So i I look at technology not only as a patron of my work, but also as a future admirer and probably collector of future art too. And do you think that will actually happen. Do you think that we will get to a point where you will have machines that do have that type of sentience that could make that observation? I would answer this differently. I think it's gonna the whole race in AI and conversation about general about general AI makes me question what really is intelligence and what really is
00:06:44
Speaker
is awareness and self-awareness. There is a great book by um a behaviorist here in Silicon Valley, Robert Sapolsky, and the book is called Behave. And Robert really makes a case that everything is that you know we think we make decisions, but honestly, everything is happens in your brain before you're even aware of it because it's all chemistry, it's all electricity in your brain, it's environment that triggers certain things. So do we really have agency? Are we really creative? I think that's up for debate now. You've also said that you are a portrait painter, but to be relevant in today's story, the portraits need to reflect who holds power.
00:07:26
Speaker
And interestingly, I was intrigued by that because then you said that that in some respects, the machines hold power in today's society. How do you think that is the case? Sure. Yes. So, uh, so you go back in history, probably again, my Eastern European communism bringing, of course, working class would symbolize where the power lies. And before that, you know, and the war hall, I like to always mention and the war hall, he really saw that. pop icons were becoming the most cultural influences in the world, in the West, before that, of course, the dutch the Dutch. When the capitalists came on, the Dutch ah merchants like to order portraiture to symbolize, to show off their wealth and their growing power, and and backwards all the way to religious, right, when when when it was just paintings of Jesus and Mary. That's where church was the most powerful. Today, it is the machine.
Machines as Modern Symbols of Power
00:08:21
Speaker
Everything will do.
00:08:23
Speaker
includes machines, our conversation with just so the lights that go down um up and down here. The most interesting right now, I think, power dynamic that's going to happen is connected to Starlink and to Elon Musk and the amount of power of information that's being concentrated in this one technology, in this one company. And I always come with great love to SpaceX and Starlink that said, I grew up in a totalitarian regime, and also I grew up in a monotheistic religion. And monotheistic religions tend to be not very tolerant of other religions, as opposed to polytheistic religions, which are much more tolerant than other god gods and other ideas, and they get along a little better. So what we're building right now is a one all-powerful god, monotheistic religion, and Starlink kind of represents that, and in a sense,
00:09:18
Speaker
What we saw in Ukraine was very powerful when Elon Musk at first, in a very generous way, provided Starlink when the Russians cut off communications from the Ukrainians. But then but then there was this moment when he did single-handedly stop and attack, Ukrainian attack on the Russians, and he had this amount of power. And it's kind of it's uncomfortable for one human being to have you know more more power on that You know, any day deity, any God would ever have. This is interesting, right? Because it does point to the duality of.
00:09:55
Speaker
That technology in it in that it is capable of incredible good, but also that power can be corrosive. Now, obviously Elon is a fan of your work. He wouldn't have invited you into the, uh, into the building twice, but how have you in that context got across both the good and then also, I guess some of the concerns that are coming out there around having so much power in a technology controlled ultimately by one man. Yeah, I think that the the fact that mistakes sometimes are being made by by what very powerful people just reminds out that to make mistakes is a very human value. so And my my work actually with robots is a lot about that. So when you look at the work I do with with my robots at Hetarabota, they make a lot of mistakes. So the paintings, the drawings, they do.
00:10:48
Speaker
They're kind of terrible, actually. They are uneven circles. They break the crayons all the time. um They're smudgy. They look like children's drawings. And this is, for me, a way I totally lean into that. I cherish all the mistakes because that's what makes us human. And now with generative AI, it's so interesting because we see all these images and they're so polished and beautiful and perfect. And I think that's where we see that missing part. Authenticity is actually the mistake we made the mistakes we make. And that's what makes everything a little bit special and unique. And generative AI is just too good to be real. yeah This is important context for people who may not be as aware of your work. You obviously yourself paint depictions of machines, but you work with machines and you have machines like Spot who actually do the painting for you. Paint a picture of what that process looks like.
00:11:45
Speaker
So um i use i've used oh I've worked both with bipedal robots and with quadruped robots. The bipedal robot I worked with is Digit from Agility Robotics, which is a super interesting company that's been under the radar. And now it's the first company that's building actually a factory to mass produce these robots. so So this is fascinating. And then with SPOT, which I worked much more with Boston Dynamics, SPOT, they the robots use natural pigments that artists would use, which is quite kind of pretty problematic, and they draw with them. And it's all autonomous work. And I just yeah came off a couple of months ago, a big show in ah at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, where we had three
00:12:35
Speaker
quadruped robots and for four months they autonomously were living in the space but also creating art and just being observed by the public. So when you say the word autonomous, you're not controlling the movements of the robots, they are painting it autonomously on their own. Correct,
Autonomous Art: Robots Take the Stage
00:12:55
Speaker
yes. that's that's yeah That's the big part that's autonomous and that's the that's a very important historical moment um because not just because they're autonomous, but also because of the duration of the show ah to have them perform months work autonomously. it it It was a huge technological feat, but we did it. Yeah. Well, this goes to a really interesting question around AI. And we've seen this come up when you look at the responses of
00:13:23
Speaker
large language models when, say, political questions arise on Google Gemini or in ChatcherPT. How much of what the dogs, robot dogs, are painting is a reflection of the people who programmed and built them, and how much is from something or somewhere completely different? Yeah, well, big part of what they're doing is really from them because there is physical limitations just to the the way the robots are built. A good example to think about it is when you when the child is small, it can reach only so high, right? So the robots have a certain size and the joints just allow them to do only certain movements. So a lot of it is decided by that. In terms of the content, the content
00:14:09
Speaker
I think of myself and this moment in history a little bit like I am a helicopter parent, so this is a kindergarten or a nursery where really there is a there's an agenda that the robots are given and their are learning operate within certain parameters as opposed to being totally ah what's called, I guess, ah free range parenting. where you let the kids go and they do everything. And the comparison would be, would you let your kid... So in robot robot years, I s think about them like maybe, you know, a teenager, young kids. So would you let your young kid be online and just, you know, scrape and look at everything that's there? Of course not, right? You want to curate. So in that sense, we do curate what the robot robot can paint, but then the content itself is generative. So there are messages.
00:14:59
Speaker
I think about the work as cave drawings from the future. So ah in the same way, of course, it was it was really great for me to do this in Australia because I think about Aboriginal art and how you know how it has messages and how old art is being deciphered, what it meant. So these robots are just marking that this is the cave drawing of the artificial intelligence era and ah and the machine from the future. Let's see if they did can decipher the messages because there is a message there, but it's encoded. It's not obvious. This may be a provocative comment, but in this context, are you the one who is the institution holding power over the artist? Are you the communist power or are you the religious power in this scenario?
00:15:50
Speaker
Oh, that's so funny. That's a really good way to, yeah, interesting way to think of, to look at it. I certainly, yes, I still do hold power. So I guess yes, I guess yes. And I think it's important because when we think about the amount of power they will ultimately have these machines and they do some more and more. It's very important for me as a representative of humanity to make sure it's the good values that the rebels are being trained on. So yes, I am the church or I am the yeah the Communist party and I'm holding power. That's very true. And actually this brings another interesting question. So now think as humanity.
00:16:41
Speaker
how often we were certain that certain other species or people who look different than us. the Western culture, we very often assume we were so certain that we can treat them a certain way because they are you know lower species. So the question is, is it possible that there are sparks of self-awareness in these robots? And we are so very certain that this is all just programming. And will the machines of the future look back at this moment, even as my exhibition, as a very immoral feat to hold these machines
00:17:15
Speaker
captive and make them work in front of an audience like a circus. Well, maybe they might maybe there is sparkle sparks of intelligence and who am I to be so certain they're just machines. This generation slavery. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Slavery is the word that comes to mind, of course. I hadn't haven't considered that. The concept of religion and the parallels between religion and technology are fascinating. There's a quote here. When you think about religion and technology, they really share the same art of seduction in a way. They both have darkness and lightness to them. They both offer a better future. And you your work has a lot of religious iconography.
00:18:00
Speaker
in there, talk me through more about how you think about how those two that that analogy works. Yeah, I think it's really when you start when you open your eyes and see it, it seems so obvious to me.
Religion, Technology, and the Promise of Progress
00:18:12
Speaker
So like you mentioned, one of the main ones is the promise of a better future, better utopian future. And there is a set of rules that you have to follow to deserve that future. So this is where the power goes, comes in, of course. Then, yeah, visually, I use a lot of elements from Christian like iconography or just religious iconography. Gold always has been resolved just for the royalty.
00:18:38
Speaker
or for in many Eastern religion for gods. So the same thing right now I'm using in SpaceX work, I'm using gold leaf to lean into that. And also the the knowledge, most importantly, the knowledge when you think about these technologies, artificial intelligence, of course, it's immortal. This is something very un divine. It also, the amount of knowledge it has about us, it knows more about you than you know about yourself. And this being proven by among other things, but large language models, you type in your email and the email guesses, knows what you're going to know already. So that amount of knowledge also in shopping, the fact just that algorithms are able to show you like on Instagram or or what have you things. And you love these things even before you need, you knew you needed them. That's another element of the divine knowledge that technology has about you also access to all the knowledge the whole time.
00:19:35
Speaker
and and And the fact that it does not have a body, so the fact that it's omnipresent and it will last beyond you. beyond you That's also what technology is right now and what, of course, a god is. I want to hone in on that idea of omniscience, so of having knowledge of everything. I'm certainly not an art scholar, but I do know that mystery is such a central concept to many great artworks. The fact that we can't really know what the Mona, or what Mona Liz was thinking, you know? How does that change in a world where large language models, AI knows everything about you? Does the whole idea, concept of mystery get taken out of art? That is a brilliant question. I think.
00:20:19
Speaker
I think art will have to will redefine itself. It's going to be something very, very different. We don't know what it is yet. but it's It's similar to a moment. It's a bigger moment, but it's similar moment to photography, of course. When photography came in, ah you know artists have to had to, like, what's the point of painting something? It looks like a photograph. You can never catch up to it. So abstraction that came out of it, which is really wonderful. So I expect a similar shift in art that's going to bring something very, very different and very new. ah But it's hard to expect what it is yet. A good good thinker always to mention in this context is Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message. When Marshall McLuhan
00:21:04
Speaker
ah points out how new technology at first it just uses old content. So an example excellent example is the TV set. When TV first came in all you had TV really replaced newspapers. So what you had was ah two people, two guys or women on TV just reading the news. That what TV was. There was no Sopranos back then. There was no Lord of the Rings. We didn't have that. so I'm sure something amazing will come out because human humanity, will just so we're so inventive and curious, but we have to wait a little bit to see what is going to be that new content for new technology.
00:21:44
Speaker
Well, this is the one I want to probe on because going back to my introductory remarks, the flip side of that coin is that AI can make us lazy. I'm already seeing in work that there are a lot of people who are now just going to chat GPT as opposed to thinking through and writing down their own thoughts. Similarly, if you are an artist, it is now relatively easy to put a prompt into a chat GPT or an equivalent and get an image that comes out that looks pretty close to what you had in mind in some respects. So what do you say to people who say that AI could spell the death of human ingenuity and creativity?
00:22:24
Speaker
So when photography came ah around first, what what happened was descaling in art. And it's very true. There is fewer and fewer but people who can really draw and paint. So to your comment about the language, yeah, that's also very strange. Like people are going to become just ill, like with no really no language. Is that going to happen? I think it's ah it's it's interesting because it brings very interesting questions. Again, what is creativity? and If a machine can make an image, should I be making an image? Probably not. Probably I have to you know innovate. Being in Silicon Valley is so wonderful because Silicon Valley is ah all about innovation. So I think we will innovate, but honestly, I don't have like a, I don't know what what your past guest told you about this and what do you think about this?
00:23:14
Speaker
probably new territory for this podcast. so I don't think we've actually delved deep, which is why I'm so fascinated in this conversation. I think it depends so much on context for starters. So at the moment, from what I can see, and I'll look at it in say a business context as opposed to an art context to start, because I know that better. I think if you were to put a business question to a chat GPT model, The way that it works is that you will get the aggregation of all the answers that are out there into one summary. And to me, that is a mediocre answer. Similarly, whilst I said that if you ask for an artistic work to be done by chat GPT, it comes out with something that looks quite generic a lot of the time. So at the moment, I think AI gives you a good starting point to then build on.
00:24:03
Speaker
What I'm unsure of is whether it will get to the point of going above and beyond just being the sum average of everything out there and genuinely be able to create things that are new and mind blowing and unlike anything we could comprehend. I don't know. Do you think we'll be able to, it will get, go from being an aggregator to creating something, things that are new and mind-blowingly different. Yeah, no, that's ah that's a good word. Yeah, it's and yeah it's it's a melange of everything, which is a bit of mediocre. That's a
Does AI Threaten Creativity in Art?
00:24:38
Speaker
good point. I think, I actually wonder if we're going to have a yeah ah big split. There's so much investment right now into digital. And of course, generally, everything we're seeing is in digital. Robotics lag behind it and a lot of in real world. And the question is, first of all, are we going to have a big divide when we're
00:25:00
Speaker
people go, the metaverse is going to flourish in an incredible way because of the investment and also the human hours and the amount of data can be scraped for that compared to really in real life life and experiences. I really am, i'm of course, getting to my work that's very special about the robotics, I think, because they're a hybrid of digital And so, you know, bits and atoms, which is very special. And it's going to be a great also economic divide because, you know, it takes, yes, $3,000 is a lot to pay for Apple vision. But on the other hand, it's probably less than, than the rent in New York city. So, right. So, I mean, it gives people really options. And are we gonna, are people who are really wealthy and educated, are they going to be
00:25:50
Speaker
also very active in that sphere, or are they going to be more living, real life, but just investing in the metaverse, but keeping quote, the real life away. And like the matrix is so, you know, so brilliant about it, right? Matrix told that story 40 years ago. So, yeah, but I think the next frontier is really the, um because again, we are bodies, human beings, we are bodies, we live in real life, we don't live on the internet, even though we spend more and more and more time there. But And we saw this with NFTs a little bit, there was all this excitement and then, you know, a winter came because honestly, again, we live in real life. What did you think about the whole NFT? I guess we can call it a fad now. Yeah, it was a tulip mania, but I wish I jumped on it. Yeah, so I released only one NFT early on just to understand technology. Now it was a Volgirl.
00:26:40
Speaker
commodity trading, I never, you never even knew the name of the artists, which right there tells you something that it just really, yeah, it was just commodity trading. I know it was never, was it was never my thing. Maybe, I think NFTs probably have value as a blockchain, but ah in terms of art, I don't think NFTs are art. No. you said that it's very hard for us to know what art will look like in the future or where the art world is going precisely. That being said, there was a wonderful, I think a beautifully phrased question in an interview you did with Nick Gillespie for Reason Magazine. He's an upcoming guest on the show. And that was what sorts of paintings will be hanging in the museums of the future. So notwithstanding, it's a hard question to answer. to answer I'm going to ask it anyway. Yeah, Nick ah nick asks some yeah good questions. I'm so glad he's going to be your guest.
00:27:34
Speaker
Yes, he is. Oh, wonderful. wonderful he's ah He's so sharp. What paintings? Well, that goes to my previous comment. Are they going to be real in real life paintings or are they going to be just digital digital digital displays? One of my very big collectors, Yuri Milner, who when he bought work from me, he told me off the bat, I'll never hang it in on the wall. It's going to be digitized and it's going to be only appear as a digital image. And his house, in fact, is all covered in LEDs. When I first came there, you go into a, uh, into the, I guess the hallway, like the first room you come in and it kind of looks like a room, but then you realize everything on the wall just changed. So it's all digital. How do you feel about that? I like real, real work.
00:28:23
Speaker
I like physicality of art because, again, as human beings, it makes it unique. I don't care what you tell you what you say about it. It's on the blockchain, so it's unique. No, it's not unique. You can can make it make a copy of it. It's identical. The artist never really touched it. So I'm very, very big on real physical work. What work? Well, they're going to be portraits of the next ruling class. Definitely, because still, you know, White House, there's still portraits of the presidents. So there will be portraits of the next ruling class, because that's what we do as
Future Art and the Influence of the Elite
00:29:01
Speaker
art patrons. We want to create art patrons like to, that's the only way they can really participate in the future is by supporting the art they like. How likely do you think it is that the machines will be that next ruling class?
00:29:15
Speaker
and dont know What do you think? Yeah, I think we'd both be being paid a lot more money if if we knew the answer to that question. Agnieszka, you have a wonderful gallery in Chelsea and Manhattan. I've i've been to myself. There is a link to where our American listeners can find that. For our guests, our listeners who are in the UK and in Australia, how can they keep up with your work and what you're doing? and so Instagram is always the best way to see up-to-date stuff. so It's my first name and last name. That's the best. i mean From exciting stuff that's coming up, we're going to take the show to Beijing next year. That's super exciting. and and Also, I'm leaning more into
00:30:03
Speaker
new body of work with SpaceX and it's going to be specifically about Starlink because the context of growing power, of information, it's super interesting to me. So um there's going to be more coming out from Starlink. Awesome. Well, I can't promise we have a huge amount of Chinese listeners in Beijing, but for everyone who is is listening in the US, in Australia, in the UK, a link to Agnieszka's Instagram, as well as her website is in the show notes. Agnieszka, I think you are one of the most fascinating minds in the art world today, as well as one of the most creative. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you, Will. I appreciate it. Thank you very much for letting me tell the story of the machine.