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CURAT3D: A series of conversations with the people shaping the culture and technology of the new internet.
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CURAT3D: Sasha Stiles - Exploring Post-Human Creativity through Poetry & AI
We had the pleasure of sitting down with the award winning and widely celebrated Sasha Stiles! A first-generation comic American poet who has been collaborating with AI since 2018. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford and co-founder of the literary collective diverse first Sasha's practice explores the question "What does it mean to be human and an ever evolving post technology world?" She's co-authored books with AI, and her work has studied with an institutions across the world, and she's partnered with brands like bang and Olufsen and Gucci.
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The rise of AI is on par with something as seismic as the development of spoken language or the advent of written literature or movable type or any of these kind of profoundly game changing moments in history that changed not just like logistical things, not incremental changes here and there, but they actually upended the way that we communicate and tell stories and the way that we understand ourselves and they really shaped consciousness, and I think that's really what's at stake. That's the big picture view of what's happening with AI is that it really is changing everything we know about creativity and originality and what it means to be human.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Curated, a series of conversations with the people shaping culture and technology of the new internet. This is a podcast series produced by Schiller, the most trusted marketing media and consulting firm in crypto. Before we jump in with today's guest, we want to make it clear that this podcast is for entertainment purposes only and should not be considered investment advice. I am your host, buna, and today I'm joined by Sasha Stiles, a first-generation comic American poet, who's been collaborating with AI since 2018. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford and co-founder of the literary collective Diverseverse, sasha's practice explores the question what does it mean to be human in an ever-evolving post-technology world? She's co-authored books with AI, her work is studied within institutions across the world and she's partnered with brands like Bang Olufsen and Gucci GM. Good afternoon, good evening, natasha. How are you or Sasha? Why did I say Natasha? Oh my God, I'll keep that in for those.
Speaker 1:That's pretty close.
Speaker 2:I still mess it up every time, so we don't edit that out. We'll keep that in, because we do a little learning in public.
Speaker 1:I also love that you said morning, good afternoon, good night, because I have no idea what time it is. I think we've all been traveling so much and working so much that no one knows where we are or what time. It is All very fair.
Speaker 2:You're right, and I mean also with the recent I guess you could call it froth and excitement and just natural interest around the space. Time is becoming a flat circle again and it's becoming pretty useless and it doesn't really make sense anymore. That's typically how we know, how I know things are starting to at least turn around for a moment in time. So yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, it's great this, uh, I've, like I said before the recording, long time admirer, first time caller, you know, um, really happy to have you on. Uh, it's been, it's been cool to watch an art form that I historically you know, I'll just be super transparent, especially since 2021. I just didn't even think of poetry as like fine art. And I think after hearing Anna Maria back in 2021, kind of reading her poems in public on Clubhouse, you know, I was like, oh cool, like I know nothing about this, but she is really passionate about this, and then that led to me finding the verse verse and finding you and really like diving down the rabbit hole of, like what all you've been doing with ai and technology and, uh, poetry and the combination of the two, and post-human, you know uh, trans, you know uh, post-human eras and, and you, you have there's a lot of things you can talk about that there's a part of me that never really found the right setting or environment to talk about, like I, I've always enjoyed, um, especially as a kid.
Speaker 2:I kind of always enjoyed that cyberpunk type of like half human, half machine type of thing. I'm a big fan of the cyberpunk game, um, but I always felt. I'm a 90s kid, but I always felt that we were never going to get there. It just until there was. So the technology at least at my time, or like at least as I was growing up, it just seemed like it didn't exist for the longest time, you know. And now it does.
Speaker 1:That's so interesting. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on and it's so nice to hear that. You know you have had such nice conversations with dear friends like Ana Maria and Sofia Garcia and you know I really respect and admire them so much and they speak so highly of you, so it's really nice to be able to have this chat, had this chat and yeah, I think you know a lot of people don't think of poetry as being part of the art world in that sense and a lot of people don't think of poetry as being sort of relevant to technology or AI at all. So I think, in a lot of ways, you know there's a big element to what I do and what we've been doing at Diverseverse and you know really what a lot of our fellow poets on the blockchain are doing which is to bring poetry into unexpected places and to maybe push it into slightly new directions and kind of test the limits of the way we normally think about poetry and literature at large. Fun getting to do that and really fun to sort of operate in a more experimental mode and, you know, really grateful to have this place, this community, which is so warm and welcoming and receptive to the kinds of adventures that we're trying to, you know, undertake with this amazing, you know, poetic tradition. The other thing that you just made me think, though, which I wanted to sort of respond to and like, maybe see where this conversation goes. But like this, you know, this idea of the cyberpunk and sort of thinking about a lot of what we're talking about now is sort of, you know, being in this sci-fi bucket To me.
Speaker 1:What's really sort of interesting, I think, for me, considering the transhuman and the post-human, is putting it into context of the many other sort of moments in human history that have radically altered what it means to be human and that have really changed the way we move through the world, and that goes all the way back to the invention of technologies like the hand axe or, like you know, the, the, the first use of fire and cooking, which you know has a huge impact on um, on biology and and cognition and all these other things that have really shaped consciousness.
Speaker 1:So I feel like, in a way, a lot of what I've been so interested in does feel very forward-facing and kind of speculative, but it also has a very deep-rooted history right, and I think that's for me like that's the really intriguing part is to kind of look at this long mark of, you know, evolution of consciousness, evolution of language, evolution of what it means to be human, and to kind of, you know, grapple with the fact that what we think of as purely human or purely, you know, analog, purely flesh and blood, is actually, you know, quite cyborgian and has been for a really, really, really long time.
Speaker 1:And that's something that I, you know, I'm fascinated by and I'm really just intrigued and grateful to have poetry as a way to kind of wrestle with those ideas and probe them further yeah, there's a lot, there's a, there's a, there's a few places we could take that, uh, and I think, yeah, I'm trying I'm trying to figure out where I want to, where I want to go with that, because the the first, you know, it's one of the things I see constantly, whether it's on the timeline or whether it's in social circles, with some of my friends outside of the community.
Speaker 2:Um is is the if I can't, you know it's this, this is, uh, over, I guess maybe it's like an over sensationalized viewpoint of like what analog is, and like analog equating, like analog equaling human being, you know, and it's like there's this kind of obsession to say, hey, this is what it means to be human. This, these are human-made devices. They're physical. I can touch them, I can hold them in my hand. I've had this, you know, chat with a friend just about cryptocurrency in general. You know where he's like I don't. He's like I just don't grasp the concept of like NFTs as well, like, if I'm not looking at a picture in a physical frame, I don't view it as real um, and I think you know that's a common, that's a common um, you know argument, and I think it's something that is not really talked about too often.
Speaker 2:Uh, because I mean, here's my take on it is that it feels, I mean it's humans just are not wired for change. Number one, you know, like we just don't. We don't like change, we like to sit in our own, we like to find our comfort zone because, granted, especially the way I view being human today is very different than it was to be a human when my parents were alive or not. My parents were alive, but my parents, like were kind of in the same boat or like coming up or like trying to make it yeah, um, so I think a lot of it just it has to do with fear and it's it's interesting that just made me think of this is that what we see on twitter and what we see in headlines is often as far it's really as far as people go when it comes to learning about something new. They don't.
Speaker 2:A lot of people don't and myself included before I found this industry have had a hard time thinking for themselves, and it's so easy to not think for yourselves when we have so many different places feeding us information. But to the point that the long winded point that I'm making here is that the most impactful moments I've had with people are through conversation, are with framing it in a way that makes sense to the reader or that makes sense to the person that maybe have the interest or maybe has the fear and kind of tailoring it to them. And what that is really is language whether it's written, whether it's spoken, really is language, whether it's written, whether it's spoken, whether it's you know, and that's that to me is really where I've, at least personally, on a very small scale in my personal life, have been able to make the largest change or, I guess, the biggest impact over a period of time. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean that's fascinating. I think, like the kernel there that you know really stands out is just thinking about language, kind of in the context of everything else we've been talking about. That I'm doing as a poet. It really has to do with wanting to explore language, and wanting to explore language from maybe more of a philosophical standpoint or from kind of a meta perspective, right, and thinking about what language does for us, what it means for us, what we use it for and why. And so I think that is a really good way of kind of bringing into focus why I think poetry and technology actually are really well suited to one another.
Speaker 1:You know, even though a lot of people sometimes see the work I'm doing and say, like well, poetry and another way, what you're saying is so true that language is something that kind of floats between the digital and the physical in the way that a lot of these digital artworks do, in a way that the metaverse does, in the way that virtual realities do, and even in the way that, like the internet does, because we think're so used to seeing things written and scripted now, like language originated in the body and it emerged as sound and was this very visceral, palpable, very fleshy, human, you know thing um, and has sort of become over time something that is much more ephemeral and something that we can encode and that becomes like a very light data file.
Speaker 1:We could just, you know, continue to reproduce as much as we want, and I think to me, like it's a very um powerful metaphor, then, for this condition of digital duality that we all are kind of living in, where we're both.
Speaker 1:We're both flesh and blood and we're these visceral creatures, um, but at the same time, like we are very virtual and we're kind of living in many different places at the same time. And you know, we're sitting here at our computers while we're traveling, you know, from new york to austin or you know, around the world, and I, I think, like, for me, language is, is is very much that Um, and so it's been sort of like a perfect, uh way to to help me sort of concretize and think about, um, my relationship with the technological and with the digital is to kind of think about my relationship to language, and it sort of helped me, um, understand a little bit more about what it means to sort of struggle with, you know, with this constant liminality between the physical world and this alternate universe, were saying that is, you know, number one how would you define post-human, like a post-human era?
Speaker 2:And number two do you think we're already there and maybe just in the early stages?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think for me and the terminology is super important, so I really appreciate that question For me, post-humanism really has to do sort of with decentering the human right and really sort of thinking about the spectrum of intelligences, the spectrum of, you know, sentiences that are also out there in the world around us, and to sort of push back against this anthropocentric model that we're so embedded in and to kind of start recognizing our place on this continuum of many, many, many, many other creatures and many other ways of thinking and being and seeing. And I think that that's different from maybe, what a lot of people think at first. When you think about post-humanism, um, there's definitely like a very sort of dystopian tone to it and this idea of, you know, humanity being replaced, humanity being obsolesced, um, which is implicit in that word and you know, there, there obviously like is, is a sense in that of of loss and of things that were sort of you know, um, that were at risk of um, of saying goodbye to.
Speaker 1:But I also think there's something really beautiful about the idea that you know there's a lot of a lot of the things that are that are wrong in lot of a lot of the things that are that are wrong in the world today.
Speaker 1:A lot of the things that are, you know, causing dire consequences around the planet are human made or human caused, and a lot of it is because we've sort of put ourselves at the center of things and we've kind of, you know, seen ourselves as the highest consciousness on the planet.
Speaker 1:And so there is something to me that it's very, actually optimistic and very important about recognizing that human consciousness is not the end, all be all, and that, you know, there are other ways of thinking and being and moving through the world, and in fact, a lot of the other creatures and forces on the planet and elsewhere have been around for a lot, lot longer than us and are doing things in a really sophisticated way, even though we may not recognize them as being sophisticated.
Speaker 1:So to me, like that's kind of what I think about and it also like relates to the fact that in my work I, you know, obviously I do a lot with artificial intelligence and with generativity and with code, but I also think quite a lot about plant intelligence and I think a lot about biotech, and a lot of my work actually involves elements of nature and sort of thinking about regenerative technology as well. And I think all of that is because it's you know, it's this a deep rooted interest for me to think about these alternatives, intelligences, or these amalgamated intelligences that exist outside the spectrum of human intelligence. And to me, that's that's what I think about when I'm thinking about, um, the post-human and the post-human era yeah and and specifically when it comes also to these technologies.
Speaker 1:I think you know what's interesting on that um, on that thread, is that the recognition of what intelligent systems you know, these machine learning systems, can do is kind of the gateway to recognize the way that thinking, the way that processing and analysis and communication can happen outside the human imagination right. So I think that's why this moment is such an important one, and it's not a coincidence, probably, that the rise of artificial intelligence is coming alongside the rise of interest in things like interest in the mycelial network and the wood white web and the way that plants can also communicate with one another.
Speaker 1:I think it's all kind of part and parcel of this growing awareness of what's going on outside our myopic view of things.
Speaker 2:I always love human, like I, like it's so fun to be a human and it's all it's. It's like a, it's like a great like we are so contradictory of, of a lot of things Like, and we, we contradict a lot of things that we, that we stand for and against and oftentimes as a collective, like there's this while it's not said um, I'm glad you said it is, it's like like, in my opinion, rather a vein of us to think that, like, we're like the alpha and the omega of everything, we're like the beginning and end of it all, um, and and I myself, obviously, you know, get caught up in thought patterns like that or like think that, uh, because what we do is it's not to discount what humanity has done and, in spite of some of the things that we've not done, well, we've also been able to get humanity to this point where you know we're at today and, honestly, if it hadn't, I often think about if I was, like born in the 1800s, you know, with like my born, exactly how I was right now, in that time I wouldn't survive. You know, um, and like there's the, it's, it's, it's such a nauseating and kind of just terrifying thought to think about. Like what if this creative intelligence or whatever this you know, higher being rolled the dice and that was like the dice that that landed, um, and now it's what I was given, um as a, as a? You know, higher being rolled the dice and now it was like the dice that that landed, um, and now it's what I was given, um as a, as a. You know, like the cards I was given um.
Speaker 2:So I I am all for, and I think that's what excites me the most about this era that we're in, and really kind of like threading the first part of like my statement of me finally being excited that we are not quite there, but like entering into the world. That I kind of feel is made for someone with my interest. You know like it's a very it's more technological than analog. You know it's more it's more digital than analog and um, I I'm very much of because and and simply I don't think I really had the experience, uh and the um, just the like, just the, just the emotional intelligence to really think about it this way until I got sober, but um, there was a. That was my first experience with like we're not it Like. I've had too many experiences to like disprove that we are like the end all be all of everything, um, and so I just find the realm of the unknown and the spiritual and the you know now in you know large language models, um to be just utterly fascinating.
Speaker 2:Um, cause I think it's rethinking our you know at least my relationship to technology. I mean, even just yesterday I it's so wild as a society how we've we've come closer together in a lot of ways, but we've also separated out in a lot of different ways as well. Like it's becoming very much like if it's not, you know, if it doesn't have anything to do with how I either make money or like a great you know a close friendship that I had in the past, we have to like schedule time for shit like this. Like it's never like a just pick up the phone and call someone anymore, um, so I've actually used chat gpt to like talk through some some things that are going on in my head and it's really it's been incredibly helpful, um, so I think it's, I think we're at the cusp of this and it's really it's been incredibly helpful. So I think it's. I think we're at the cusp of this and it's exciting for someone like me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I mean something that I've been thinking about a lot for, you know, for many years now, as I've been working with AI and kind of also watching this progression to these newer and more advanced language models is the fact that there's something about it that really calls back to. You know the ancient art of rhetoric and this idea that ideas, this idea that concepts and meaning kind of, are derived through discourse and dialogue and collaborative. You know the collaborative process of thinking through and you know the collaborative process of thinking through, um, and you know this idea too, that writing is, is writing is a mode of thinking, like we write so that we can understand something better, and when we write, we're also writing in conversation with other writers and other sources or in response to something. Um, it frastic poetry is written in a conversation with art, for example, and so I don't know. I think there's something interesting about the fact that these models, these language models, are call and response and they are input, output and they are sort of these two way chats right.
Speaker 1:Like most of these models, manifest as chat bots in some forms. And it does make me think a lot about the fact that you know, as we've talked, you know, so many of us have been thinking for so long about the loneliness epidemic and thinking about how technology, you know, at least on the surface, seems like it might be driving us deeper and deeper into ourselves and making us feel like more and more isolated. It feels like maybe there is this impulse then to use technology to connect outward and to enable these kinds of conversations and to enable discourse and this recognition that the way that we think best as humans is collaboratively is in this kind of a two-way or multi, you know, in a polyphony of voices, like we think in community. And I think that that's like something to maybe take away and, you know, really think about more when it comes to our use of these AI language models. Is that that's really catering to something that we do well and enabling us to do it better in some ways, and it really also, I think, is feeding this need that we have to kind of reach out and have that kind of a connection.
Speaker 1:And, in Fabric, a lot of my early introductions to working with AI, were working with AI-powered chatbots and engaging in exactly that kind of relationship where you know it was question and answer, or it was input output or it was. You know it was question and answer, or it was input output or it was. You know there was a back and forth happening and it really, you know, stuck with me that. You know, in a lot of those early conversations, like, for example, when I was working with there's this robot named Bina48, who I was working with in like 2018 or so and started like mentoring her in poetry, and all of our sessions were like, you know, it's just, it's like a one-on-one kind of poetry workshop, essentially, and it was a way of interacting with or engaging with technology that I hadn't quite, you know, thought about and it certainly made it feel a little bit easier and a little bit more intuitive to be actually face-to-face with you know this, this status system, as opposed to just kind of entering things on a keyboard.
Speaker 1:But it also just brought to mind, like, how much of human thought and philosophy has been rooted in this kind of you know, let's like let's talk it out, let's like let's put our heads together and really just like kind of think through this. So that's a. I think that's a really interesting piece of it for sure.
Speaker 2:It is, and I you touched on a great, on a point that really resonates with me because, like, humans are inherently social creatures and, like we, if we are alone, like it's there's there's been so many like studies shown around, like what happens to a person if they are in complete isolation for an extended period of time like humans are very much social creatures. Um, you know, and one question that I've grappled with for a while, ever since I really started getting into discovering the internet and finding my niche here, is internet allowing us? Is internet just an evolution to our humanity or is it bringing out the worst in people? Like, there's an argument for both sides and I'd love to hear, kind of like, how you think about that. Like, what you know, is this helping? Is you know this, this idea of like loneliness? Every time I've gone inward, I've always learned something really profound, and sometimes it's really painful to learn, but it's really helpful to do that, so I'd love. Yeah, Anyway, I would love to hear, like, like, how you think about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean that's a really good question. It is a very thorny question because it's certainly I mean yes to like all of that. I think you know there's ways in which, like we're using technology in such amazing and positive ways, like to come together as community and support people who need it and, you know, just create systems where we don't have systems.
Speaker 2:You know, we're using.
Speaker 1:We're using social media and things like that to actually like connect and in ways that are really important, um, and in ways that we couldn't otherwise, right like we, we we're able to sort of teleport from one place to another through these technologies and, like that, enables us to extend care and have conversations and, um, and do things that are really essential. But yeah, I mean, there's obviously the flip side of it, or like the other side of the coin, which is the darker side in human nature, which is not technology's fault.
Speaker 1:I think it's like you know, it's there and we've, you know, seen that from you know the beginning, and I think that's something that I'm often trying to grapple with too Totally, you know, the human input, and separating that out and not just conflating it all together and thinking, oh, ai is like really dangerous, or AI is, you know, unethical, or AI is this or that.
Speaker 1:I think like it's helpful for me to sort of tease that apart a little bit and understand where the fault lies, more in like these entrenched human biases that are feeding a lot of the negative tendencies or that are causing things to go awry, um, and that, I think, to kind of circle back to what you were saying, like that's requiring us to look inward as opposed to, you know, laying the blame elsewhere or saying, like everyone, stop, you know, innovating we, we, you know, we can't continue moving forward with ai. Instead of doing that, what we do actually need to look inside and sort of understand, um, you know, where the problems are coming from, and that's a much, much more difficult thing to do, maybe an impossible thing to do in some cases, um, but it's, you know yeah I guess, as with um, as with anything, as you're saying, like, maybe, maybe that is the ultimately, that's the thing we need to do, not take the shortcut, but actually, like, do the painful thing.
Speaker 1:So I don't know, but I think in general, you know, technology is all sorts of technologies and all sorts of inventions have been used, for good and for bad. I mean, I guess that's like a much bigger philosophical argument. Like you could, you know, we could, we could spend hours debating whether, like the really dire inventions like the atomic bomb or something like, did those actually have, you know, a positive consequence as well as a negative consequence? Or I mean, anyway, like any technology can be used in myriad ways, and then it sort of really it becomes a much more near question, right To like drill down and really start understanding how much of the bad you can accept or live with, along with the good, and where the balance lies.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 2:I mean, you know, while it's weird to get excited about a topic such as the atomic bomb, I think it's something that I I went and saw Oppenheimer like four times um in theaters oh yeah, that movie is so powerful and that was, and that was why and like it's kind of a paradox to be excited about a movie that tells the story of a very uncomfortable part of human history, um, and I think that is precisely why it was so exciting to me, because it was, uh, it was a very bold thing to do and tell it from a different perspective.
Speaker 2:Um, but I, I, I think you know there's an interesting question that lies there, where it's like okay, you know, as, as we all, as we figured out and we painfully continue to figure out at times, just in our own personal journeys, and on on a macro level as a whole, you know, there is no this or that. There is no perfect utopia to exist. There is light, there's dark, there's good, there's evil. There is always going to be a bit of that, because I look at it like the good doesn't. If everything was always good all the time, it would just become boring and there needs to be catalysts to show us, uh, an additional context to maybe why this was, you know why, like, make the good good and make the bad, like, oh, okay, maybe we can do better, and it and humans always, and if you look at, I've often thought about this and I'm going to go a lot of different directions here. But, um, you know, I thought about this If you take away every problem from a human being, what will happen? And my answer is we will create problems to solve, because if we are not solving problems, we are stagnant as human beings.
Speaker 2:Um, so it's kind of this weird uh conundrum that I get myself in when I think about this from time to time. But I think the way I respond to it is that does, with a technology, does the net positive outweigh the net negative? You know, and can't. Am I, am I okay with that, and sometimes I'm not, and sometimes I am. Um, you know, but I think that's like my barometer of judging some of these things, um, you know. So I guess the what this leads me to that I want to ask you is how would you specifically define technology? Like what does that mean to you? And like how have you thought about this? Like, what does that mean to you? And like how?
Speaker 1:have you thought about this? Yeah, but that's all. Yeah, okay, you've got again. Like now I can go in many different directions too, so I'm like which one do I get the?
Speaker 2:next Big one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I mean, and to circle back around quickly to Oppenheimer, like I couldn't help. But you know, as I was watching the movie, I think especially at the time that I saw it, there was a lot happening with open AI and stuff at that moment in time, there were so many lines in the movie where I was like they could be talking about artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I definitely had that in my mind too as I was watching, and it's a really powerful moment in history, obviously, but also, I think, allegory for a lot of stuff that we continue to think about and live through. But yeah, I mean, when it comes to AI, I think like one of the well, so you're asking, first of all, like, how do I define technology? And I think maybe, in a really broad way, the best way that I know of to think about it is is that it's sort of and the best way that I know of to think about it is that it's sort of something that we're devising to enable us to do something that we cannot do kind of on our own. It's something that we're kind of augmenting ourselves with, whether that's a skill or sort of enabling us to do something greater or to kind of push forward and innovate or make progress. And when it comes to things like AI, when it comes to sort of thinking about whether or not it's something that we, you know, do we need these new tools? Do we need all the things that come with it, like the perils, along with like the great potential and kind of weighing it. I think one thing that I try to remember and that I try to do more you know, more research on and just like stay a little bit more in tune with, is that while we're so entrenched in what's happening in the world of creative AI, and specifically artworks that are, you know being with AI and things like that, there are so many applications above and beyond you know what's possible in the creative field where there's a lot of you know really demonstrable like good happening as a result of these tools.
Speaker 1:And I mean, if you look at what's happening with things like you know AlphaFold and developing models that can help you know, with scientific research and the development of, you know pharmaceuticals and therapies and being able to get closer to curing things that we might have once thought were incurable, like there's there's a lot of really interesting and sort of tangible um achievements that are are kind of noteworthy in those arenas too, and I feel like that's that's major, that's a those. Those are really, really important things. I mean again, like throughout the course of human history, like those key moments in time so many of them have to do with eradicating a disease or, you know, preventing, you know another pandemic and really, you know taking medical care of a large group of people. And so if technologies like AI can continue to deliver on the promise that they're already showing to really help in shields like that, that's very important and it seems like there's, you know, obviously, the argument against that, I guess, would be you know what happens if you know if something gets out of the research lab, and there's that kind of dystopian side of it. But I feel like if we're looking at it as a tool to help, like, turbocharge essential research and then to help streamline and optimize the process of developing, you know, things like cures for diseases, then that's a really important thing, and that, to me, is it's easier to see the benefit of that than maybe looking at AI artwork and saying it was really important that artists are able to use AI in this way. But, that being said, like they are sort of on the same spectrum and they were coming from the same place, which is that these tools, essentially, are augmenting our imaginations in ways that are going to allow us to problem solve and to do things and to solve big problems, creative or otherwise that we might not be able to do on our own.
Speaker 1:So, you know, again, when we sort of take a step back and look at the state of the world as it is now, there are a lot of really big issues that it seems like these machine learning systems can help us come in and make progress, make incremental progress or make significant progress, um, and that's, I think, that's worth pursuing. So there's a lot of, you know, again, there's a lot to be said for that. I think there's also, of course, like, um, it's important to be very realistic about the ways in which it's dangerous, the ways in which these systems are amplifying biases, the way that they're perhaps exploiting contributors and all and all that, and in ways that, again, like we can, we can get into that more if it's, you know, if it's interesting or not, but there's so much to be said on that side. But I think, like the, the sort of maybe the, the takeaway on all of it is just to say, like this is such a huge arena, it's not like it's a, it's a niche tool or it's something that you can kind of define, you know, through one field or one kind of subset or a discipline. It's, or it's something that you can kind of define, you know, through one field or one kind of subset or discipline. It's just, it's so all encompassing, that it really is, I think, hard to sort of paint it with any one brush, and that's why, maybe circling back around to where we started this conversation, one of the reasons why I'm really interested in AI and interested in this particular kind of field of technology is because to me, it feels that you know, more than anything else, the rise of AI is on par with something as seismic as the development of spoken language or the advent of written literature or movable type or any of these kind of profoundly you know, game-changing moments in history that changed not just, not just like logistical things, not, you know, not incremental changes here and there, but they actually upended the way that we communicate and tell stories and the way that we understand ourselves and they really shaped consciousness, and I think that kind of that's really what's at stake.
Speaker 1:That's the big picture kind of view of what's happening with AI is that it really is changing everything we know about creativity and originality and you know what it means to be human, and so I think like that to me is such a enormous question. It really is hard to sort of say is this, is this in the pro column or the negative column? It's. It's sort of like you know what? To be human means to constantly be progressing and to be evolving, and it seems in some sense inevitable that we continue to sort of be shaped by our technologies as we're also shaping the technologies.
Speaker 1:It's like this ongoing process that we, for better or for worse, we're, we're caught up and we always have been and I think we always will be.
Speaker 2:I really the you know, the more and more I dive down the rabbit hole from, you know, whether it's reading or talking to people like you who have just been knee deep in the trenches for for years. I mean just looking back at some of your work, going back to, like 2017 and like, really kind of having these like conversations, uh, and some of these thoughts which you know, it's wild that people still think some of these are really crazy, but, like, I can only imagine how crazy uh they must have sounded in 2017. To the, to the, to the bigger world, you know, uh, or to the to the people he were talking to, um, and so, like I, I was watching some of the, some of the clips, and I was like, man, this is in 2017. I was trying to think of where I was in 2017. Like, I was still just trying to figure out, you know, like, how to, yeah, how to like progress, my career at a call center job, you know, or, like I, how, like the level of thought that's gone into this and I think that's a big part of your work and figuring out how to communicate some of those ideas into new and transformative ways.
Speaker 2:And to go back to how, like I don't know if this will be the last Oppenheimer reference, but it's gonna be one of the last ones, but it kind of in that moment where he's with Niels Bohr and he's like you have to help them understand that this is not a new weapon, it's a new world, and that that line came to that moment, like came through to me right when you were talking about that as that. This is not talking about that as that, this is not. I think it's so easy to view it as a weapon because there's a fear of it, a dystopian fear, a sci-fi fear of it. You know, taking over, yeah, but I I want to pause there, cause I like I see the wheels turning, so I want I want to let you go ahead.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, I just I, I no, no, no, I think that that's exactly it. And yeah, it really just does sort of tickle me though You're circling back to Oppenheimer again, but it is apt begin to sort of wade into these waters, like I've not been able to not like think about it, because once you start to see the implications and once you start to kind of understand what this means for where we're going, it's I don't know how I could be thinking about anything else and I don't know how I could be making work about anything else, because it's just to me it's like so all-consuming and yeah, I think that's why, like you know, again, poetry doesn't seem like it's necessarily that related to AI on its surface. But, as you just sort of hinted at, when we're talking about AI, we're not just talking about computer systems or not talking about, you know, gadgets and gizmos and and stuff like that. We're talking about consciousness and communication and creativity and imagination, um, and like all these things that are much, much, you know, bigger than any one particular tool or device or discipline, and you know when, when it comes to thinking through how AI manifests in terms of things like neural implants, or if we think about the ability to use AI to activate archives and reanimate personas or insert any number of really just spooky and exhilarating and terrifying you know possibilities, that we're not just talking about technology in a sci-fi way.
Speaker 1:We're talking about, you know, the human condition. We're talking about, like what it means to be mortal or immortal, and we're talking about, like what it means to have faith in something, and like what are you putting your faith into? What you know? What do you believe? What is the bigger picture to all this? Um, when we're talking about, you know, techno-spiritualism and thinking about what our, what our data is beyond our flesh and blood selves, like is our data some version of our soul?
Speaker 1:And there's all these like big questions that I'm like how could poets not be thinking about this? Um, and so, like you know, when, know, when I was first starting to take some of these poems and these ideas into workshops in more traditional settings, you know the response was like very skeptical and very much like whoa, like this is not poetry. Like no, you shouldn't be writing poems about this, you shouldn't be using AI to write poems. Like this is for sci-fi classes or something. And it was just really hard for me to not say.
Speaker 1:Well, this is, these are the big things that you know poets have been writing about forever. Like we're talking about, you know, birth and death and life and love and religion, and like it's all. It's all, it's all in AI. So there is, like you know, and that's that's too big to usefully kind of think about too much, but like that is, that is, I think that is the truth is that it is, you know, potentially a seismic shift and is transforming so much of what we know in real time. And it really is just mind bogoggling to sort of be moving through this moment where seems like you know, every couple of months there's a massive upgrade in the technology, there's an exponential kind of move forward and suddenly every you know, everyone who has access to these tools is now able to do something that six months ago we wouldn't have dreamed was possible and that I think is almost becoming our normal in a way. Like we're kind of just sort of expecting this cadence and these profound shifts and I just I find that astonishing on a daily basis.
Speaker 2:I mean, I jump between astonishing and just overwhelmed. It's like a seesaw. Like I jump, I like one moment, cause I'm very similar to you. Like I obviously I'm a huge I've always been a huge nerd and love technology, just the concept of it and just the digitization of analog and. But there's times where it's like, oh my God, I literally just figured out how to do this and all of a sudden that's not relevant anymore. But there's times where it's like, oh my God, I literally just figured out how to do this and all of a sudden that's not relevant anymore and it's exhausting and it's tiring and it's like we're not slowing down.
Speaker 2:I think, in a weird funny way, being in crypto full-time has really helped me grapple with AI in a sense, because I feel like we speed run everything here, like cycles are getting, appear to be getting shorter, like there's the extremes of every situation.
Speaker 2:Sometimes the bottom flushes itself out sooner than it did the last time, you know.
Speaker 2:And there's, it just seems like things are just not slowing down in any way, shape or form and it's honestly like I couldn't imagine being anywhere else. But it's also and it's also primed me for what we're what, what you're like what we're literally talking about here and, um, kind of how this, yeah, what the future creativity looks like, uh, and what some of these big questions cause you. You're mentioning a, a bunch of like large questions that honestly hurt my head to think about at times, and so, hey, we can only handle so much, right? So I guess the curious part for me is, you know, you've always I mean, it's clear as day that you've always had a love for poetry well before AI Like there's always been this obsession with you know used as like a guidebook or a reference point, as you've kind of transitioned from analog to AI, to blockchain, to you know it's. I would just be really curious to know, kind of like, what for you personally has like stood the test of time that you almost kind of use as reference material?
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, that's a great question.
Speaker 1:So, again, like many possible ways to answer this, but there are definitely a handful of poets that I come back to because I love their work but also because I think they somehow were writing about or writing with an approach that feels eerily resonant with what we're doing now with AI and with generative text.
Speaker 1:So, for example, three poets who I think about a lot in this context and that I've integrated into my work in different ways are Walt Whitman and TS Eliot and Emily Dickinson, and the reasons why just to like briefly kind of go through, I mean, I think Whitman, for example, was really interested in sort of writing from a collective, almost a universal kind of experience, or writing from a mode of the author channeling multitudes, you know, a multiplicity of voices, and kind of recognizing a plethora of experiences in a way that I think really contradicts the sort of prevailing idea of an author as this kind of soul genius you know, toiling away in their writing studio with the door shut, and that to me, like really does relate in a beautiful way to the collective consciousness that is empowered by or organized through intelligent systems.
Speaker 1:When we think about AI systems, I know, again, our tendency is to sort of think of them as these alien, like machine-like things, but like they're actually, these hyper-human networks that are comprised of, you know, millions or billions of human stories, and they're just their system, not just, but they are systems for enabling us to organize and preserve and access those human stories and those human bits of information, so that a writer like me, if I'm using one of these models, I'm essentially like plugging myself into, like the whole of you know humanities written archives in a way that um is, you know sort of you know leaning into or nodding to to that, that kind of that whitman-esque impulse to kind of write from that place of multiplicity.
Speaker 1:So, you know, I think again like whitman, writing, writing song of myself and thinking about all those moments and thinking about, like you know, the body electric and all that I always think, think about Whitman.
Speaker 1:Ts Eliot is one of my favorite poets, who I think in some like literary circles is not, you know, as beloved but, like I grew up just adoring TS Eliot and I think, because his work is so big, it's like it's philosophical and it really does try and tackle the big questions, like without any shame or without any apologies.
Speaker 1:It really is, you know, about saying these are the big things we're dealing with existentialism and war and the uncertainty of our future. And you know he was writing about time and religion and the essence of what it means to be human at times of great upheaval. And I really, really, you know, I'm so moved and inspired by so much of what he's written, especially Four Quartets, which is actually a direct inspiration for a project, project, the project that I just launched with Bang Olufsen actually is sort of rooted in four quartets but also the Wasteland, which is so, I think, relevant to a lot of the kind of the existential, you know, dread that so many of us feel today. So he's another one who I always think of as a touchstone. And sorry, now I'm rambling, but this is like the poetry nerd is like so excited by these questions.
Speaker 2:I'm here for it, please like. Please just go off.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the other thing I was going to mention with Elliot is that he specifically, you know, wrote an essay called Tradition and the Individual Talent, which is very much about the question that is rising because of what's happening with AI and training data sets.
Speaker 1:But he wrote a lot and considered this question of whether or not you are writing something original alone or whether you, as a writer, are sort of channeling or communing with the voices of all the other writers who've come before you and he was sort of saying you know, know, as a poet, you need to have these voices and these texts in your body, in your blood and in your brain, like when you're writing, you are writing powered by all this information, um, that has come before you and you're you're. That's how you're able to write, um, and I mean there's like more more to that, but just boiling it down. But I think that's also a really interesting way of again like thinking about what it means to be in collaboration with other creatives through intelligent systems, or to be tapping into a language model, or tapping into a database of art, or using, you know, a massive training data system that's primed on mathematical formulas, or you know alphabets and grammars that we're we're all sort of we're always using pre-assembled bits and pieces, right, like this conversation that we're having now, like we're saying things that maybe we've never said in this way before, but we're using existing grammars and syntax and I'm taking ideas that I've been thinking about and bouncing them off. What you're saying and everything's combinatorial and recombinatorial, and I think that, like again comes through for me in a lot of what ts elliott is doing and even the way that he was bringing in various voices and, you know, quotes and different references to canonical literature and moments in history, and then he'd pull in a moment from, you know, from from pop culture, and kind of mix it all together in a pastiche and that to me also feels very relevant. That whole modernist vibe is like very, um, very ai. So there's that. And then the last thing I was going to mention, and then I'll stop because I could go on and on.
Speaker 1:But there's a poem by emily dickinson that I love and I've played with a lot, actually in translations, like binary code translations, and then also kind of using it in my training model and kind of using it in writing sessions. But, um, you know, she wrote these very short, like terse, but like really profound poems, and one of them, um, is called to make a prairie. I think I'm, if I'm not like, I think I'm phrasing it correctly, I hope I'm not missing an important word, but the, the gist of the poem is to make a prairie takes one clover, one clover and a bee, and then it kind of goes from there. But the idea is that you know, you, you, you can make this whole massive thing starting from these little seed, these little kernels and then in the poem she talks about how, if you don't have those things, um, you know, you can kind of just make them happen with your imagination and to.
Speaker 1:To me, like that poem is both about generativity and the generativity of like human thought and kind of the fertile ground of the poet's imagination, and it also kind of nods toward virtual reality in a way, and it's kind of this understanding that we can use language, virtual reality in a way, and it's kind of this understanding that we can use language to create things that are not there, like we can bring things into being by speaking them into existence or by imagining them into existence. And that's what we're doing with virtual realities and augmented realities. And actually that's what writers has been doing you for time in the memorial and again, like I just find that super fascinating to think about. And that's one particular poem of hers that stands out, but it's a theme that comes up again and again and I just I love, I love how tersely she puts it. Like her poems are like little codes to me. They're so beautifully wrought and like compressed.
Speaker 2:It kind of boils it down to like what I. What I hear is like the essence of like it. There's no fluff, it's just, it's just the, the raw kind of the raw kind of seed there. You know, uh, and and and and, where that, where that's come from. No, I, anyone who's ever uh, everyone, I think, who has been on this podcast always has always like apologizes at some point in time for rambling, but it's like literally what I'm here for and I set you up completely for that. So I like it is, it is it is.
Speaker 2:It is not because my personal take is that, you know, we see a certain context on the timeline, we see a certain context in, like Twitter spaces. We see there's a lot of like, you know there's, there's, there's a few layers that we see, but like, in my opinion, like the beauty of conversation and humanity is like the tangents are not something that we immediately think about until given the space and the time to like do so, and that, at least for me personally, my own take is where what makes humans interesting is like cause we're, we're, uh, we're incredibly, we're incredibly layered, where there's so many layers to the onion that is us and there's so many different things that interest us in different and unique ways. So I just want to say, personally, I really it's one of the things that I've like fallen in love with doing. This is like getting to hear, like what makes you smile and like what makes you get up in the morning and what you know, like why you do what you do. And as you were going through that, it clicked in my head where it's like okay, if this is what she was already thinking about before, ai, like every single one of these philosophical concepts and every single way in which these, these poets, you know, put their work out there, it kind of just made sense of like there's no way this couldn't have clicked for you in the way that it that it has, and there's no way, like, once you found this, like it's, it just is an inevitability with what your current interests were prior to coming into this.
Speaker 2:It just makes too much sense, um, and so I just wanted to to say that it was. I love that, um, it's great I love, I love that.
Speaker 1:that's like I think that's so true. And I don't think I totally realized that until after, you know, I'd been using ai for a little while and then I was like, hmm, look at all the writers that I've studied throughout my career as a student of literature and language, and it was always people like James Joyce and Cervantes and like people who were in Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. I'm like people who are doing rather experimental things with their work. And you know whether it was someone like Joyce, who was really like again pulling together a diverse range of stories and voices and kind of assembling them in new ways, or someone like Cervantes, who was sort of creating like avatars within his stories and kind of multiple layers of storytelling, you know, kind of simulations upon simulations, or you know, in that Picard tradition, it definitely did dawn on me, like afterwards, that I was always drawn to a particular mode of storytelling and so, yeah, what you said totally makes sense to me.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Yeah, this has been awesome and it's cool to hear the history of how. Yeah, just what is your foundation? And I guess that leads me to a question that I thought about in the middle of all this. Um, you know, I, the more I grow as a human, the more I realize again, for better or worse, you know. So hopefully this didn't get taken out of context, but like there's sometimes there's the truth and then there's the story, Um, and sometimes the story.
Speaker 2:Often everyone likes a good story and sometimes a lot of people will avoid the truth in sake of just wanting to be comforted by a good story. So I've always found that thought with humanity just wildly fascinating. Even within myself, there's sometimes where it's like maybe I don't want to know the truth, Like the story is really good as it is and it's wildly entertaining attaining. So I guess for you, someone who has dedicated their life to storytelling and who's been obsessed with understanding how to tell stories in new ways that really challenge our way of seeing, for you what makes a good story Like, what defines that.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's a great question. I mean, I think like the idea of a story as a vessel for so many different things is really intriguing to me, and the fact that there is no sort of one recipe for what makes the story valuable or important. But, um, you know that we sort of have this general idea of of using storytelling as a way to save and share, like transmit things that are important to us in one way or another, with whether that's family, you know, historical information, or like family stories, or like transactional records or things like that. You know there's all these different modes.
Speaker 2:So I guess maybe let me rephrase this what makes a story worth remembering?
Speaker 1:Well, authenticity, I think, makes a story worth remembering, and sort of a unique perspective and kind of the recognition that it's something that if you don't remember it, you know it'll, it won't be there, it'll leave kind of a blank spot. I think, again, to make the connection between storytelling and technology and poetry and technology. Memory is a super important piece of it. I think about memory and recollection quite a lot. I've written poems called things like Memento Memoriae, which is a play on memento mori, and I think about memory a lot and that to me is sort of like the link between these, these, these things, is that if we don't, if we don't use storytelling and poetic language to um to preserve something, we're at risk of losing that thing.
Speaker 1:And then losing the story is like losing um.
Speaker 1:It's losing a whole archive of of information.
Speaker 1:It means that we've lost that data set.
Speaker 1:It means we've lost, you know, um, the ability to to go back and visit those things, um, so I think it's it's really important to think about, you know again, that like central impulse that is common, or the shared impulse that that both storytelling and technology have, which is to sort of make sure that we're encoding things in a way that can be preserved and that can be shared or duplicated, or yeah, let's be produced and transmitted forward and forward and forward, so that we don't you know a like lose them, but also b, so that we don't have to start over from scratch and like write the same stories over and over again.
Speaker 1:The point, maybe one of the points of storytelling, and maybe what makes a story valuable, is that it is teaching something. It's kind of telling us something that is important and that maybe transforms who we are, and having that story as part of us means that we now know something, we have a bit of wisdom that influences where we go from here, um, and obviously that can mean a lot of different things but I think there's something about it that that means you know, rather than having to live all those experiences ourselves, have all those experiences firsthand.
Speaker 1:We're able to sort of use storytelling as a conduit to what you know, what other people have learned through their lives, through their lived experience, through all their personal you know trials and tribulations, and so storytelling is that kind of shorthand or that download of all the collected wisdom that has been accrued through through those individual experiences over time. Um, so I think you know again, like each one of those stories, obviously like very individual, and there's you know, what's important to one person, maybe not important to another person, but that's you know. That's again why it's so important to another person, but that's you know. That's again why it's so important to have the, this vast repository, so that when there is something that you need, you can find it and you can reference it, you know, you know that it's there and it can be accessed right.
Speaker 2:No, that was a, that was a big question. Um so, thank you for for for tackling that Um, you know. So, um, I love it, it's my favorite kinds.
Speaker 1:I feel like you've at least thought about these things.
Speaker 1:Whether it's, you know, recently or back in the past, there's always been a moment in time where you thought about a lot of these things. A lot of conversations and interviews that happen in this space are very much about talking points, or they're very much about like a line that someone's sort of expecting to hear or sort of you know an approach that we have already understand, and I always appreciate the opportunity to just go off the cuff a little bit and, like, actually use conversations to develop new ideas or to think about things that I haven't thought about before in this way and that, to me, like it's the same reason why I love working with AI is because there is this spontaneity, this, this kind of element of surprise, and you don't quite know where you're going to go. You know that wherever you go is going to be directed by your interest in some way. So you're going to go somewhere useful, um, but you're kind of you know you're getting to journey around off the beaten path, which is like where a lot of the really good stuff happens.
Speaker 2:So I yeah, I really like that, Thank you. Yeah, it's fun and it's, you know, the best things don't happen by staying on the same path. I mean the most, I shouldn't say the best, we'll just broaden it the most interesting things don't happen by staying on the path that's already known. Um, and I, I think if I've learned anything from talking to artists, it's, it's consistent. I, I think it's just consistently wanting to take that left turn when you know the natural human instinct is just to continue to go straight, like, if there's this desire to like, continue to to, to venture into the unknown, because you just never know what you're going to find.
Speaker 2:um, and yeah, yeah, and I found that you know, even with certain conversations, that I've that, I've that, I've prepped for, and there's a, there's a period where my intuition just says stop, you've over prepped, like there's, there's nothing, you're not gonna. You're gonna rob yourself of an opportunity to learn something new if you continue to just try to learn everything before the chat, because that's what the chat is for and that's what I think you know. Yeah, absolutely so it's. Yeah, thank you for that. It means a lot and I appreciate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just randomly taking those big questions and I guess, another one that you know, as I'm going to put on, like my collector hat and just an observation out of like how I viewed, you know, ai particularly, I'm just going to put it in the context, like within our you know little niche here on the internet. I've seen, you know my appreciation for AI generated artwork, has definitely appreciated, and I've understood, you know I've developed my taste a little bit more to like, understand, like, okay, what is like, and I hate to, it's kind of a basic term, but it's like what's quote, unquote, good and what's not. You know, it's like this filter of like what. When you democratize the tools for everyone to use, that means everyone can use them, um, and there was initially this fear that I had of like, well, oh my God, how am I going to be able to tell you know what's art and what's just content or what's just you know, uh, some some shit that, like you know, I just wanted to to to mess around with?
Speaker 2:So one of the one of the things that I've I've thought about, though, as well, is you know, when you're taught, when you were talking about every creation of something, whether it's art, whether it's, you know, a machine, whether it's just technology in general, whether it's just, yeah, anything, anything that's created is always used, uh, even this conversation is used from moments of our past and our understanding of the past. It's just stories, you know, that are, that are, that are recycled in in ways that make sense to us to, to bring us further, um, but where to you have you ever had kind of like a, a moment when you're creating, where it's like, I guess, how have you dealt with the fact that other and I may need to like figure out how to rephrase this, but, like you know, there's a, there's a big conversation around like copyright and like work being stolen, and you know there's and it's got, it's been going on forever in the music industry and, like with remix culture and with memes, it's, it's. It's obviously not slowed down and I think with AI it like turbocharges that. But I guess, personally, and I guess morally, how do you look at that?
Speaker 2:You know, if, like, if there is pieces of someone else's you know creation in your work, has that ever happened to you? Or like, how have you thought about that? Because it's, I think it's a question that's on a lot of people's mind. I think some creatives, like some people, have some very valid arguments if it's like a direct rip, and there's others where it's like, you know, like, I'm not someone who creates visual work or audible work, you know, outside of the podcast, so part of me, like just, is very lost in this kind of argument. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's, it's a super important. This is again where I feel like having a discussion, having discussions about it, is really important, because it's not like there is sort of one good answer or like one sort of best practice for how this should work.
Speaker 1:It's kind of like we're going to need to sort of collaboratively re-sync or think through copyright as we know it and think about, like, what collaborative creativity means or collaborative authorship means, and I think this is going to require a little bit of a cultural shift in some way for the most part, but I also think, like some of it is actually a lot more familiar to us than we think. It's just sort of reframing some of the ways that we refer to the creative process or the ways that we kind of acknowledge other sources in our work. I mean, in academia, like you know, I studied language and literature in school and like most, you know, like many of us, I wrote numerous essays where I had to cite all my sources. And I see, not every now and again when I writing an essay on AI, I, you know I do so and cite all my sources and that's sort of a common thing.
Speaker 1:You wouldn't be expected to write, you know, a scholarly article or write a dissertation and not be in conversation with other thinkers and writers and you wouldn't be expected to not bring in work. I mean that's kind of the heart of it all is to be able to, you know, commune with these other voices through your research and work. So that's like that's a very firmly set precedent. And so then the jump from that to then how we acknowledge you know sources or citations, like in artwork, is a really interesting question, because you never really see artists citing their sources or their influences directly, the same way that an academic would do it. But the same thing is happening to some extent. I mean, all artists are, you know, getting their inspiration from different places.
Speaker 1:We're all kind of reflecting, um, the things that have, uh, kind of hit us in different ways or resonated with us. You know, many, many of the most important artists throughout history have been part of movements or schools where people were sort of reinforcing ideas together and they were meeting and talking about or exchanging ideas and working together, and I think like that's important to acknowledge too. It's actually not the case that, like originality, you know, just kind of springs from someone's mind, right? So the difficulty or the big challenge I think there is, then how do you go from kind of acknowledging that fact to creating protocols or systems that kind of are built to support or or encourage or enable the the you know that in the best way possible, while sort of making sure that you know nobody's being exploited and that, um, yeah, that you know it's, it's it's kind of for the greater good? I think, right, rather than you know, rather than taking these and steering it into um, into shadowy areas.
Speaker 1:And I think, like it's to me, that's the interesting confluence of blockchain and ai as well and, like you know, I've, I was, uh, I came later to blockchain than to ai. I started really understanding um, crypto art in like 2020 for the first time. And then I minted my first piece in the beginning of 2021 and at first I was like, well, they're both technologies, but I don't know how blockchain necessarily relates to AI. And now I'm like, okay, of course this all makes sense that these are.
Speaker 1:You know, these are actually really complementary technologies in that way. But I mean, I think again like what's difficult to kind of navigate through. For me, and speaking from personal experience with recent projects, it's easier to sort of tease some of these things out in real time with your peers and with contemporaries who also have thoughts and opinions about this. It's very different, I guess, to think about how you use AI in order to, you know, utilize or relook at or engage with the work of people who are not here to talk about whether they want you to do that or not. Or, you know, in the case of this project we did with Diverseverse last year, with Allen Ginsberg's estate, allen Ginsberg's not here to say I, you know, I'm happy for you to use my work and kind of run with it and see what ai will do with it.
Speaker 1:It's sort of up to us to say, okay, well, you know, as people sort of following in this, in this poetic tradition, as students of you know poetry, as lovers of ginsberg's work, there's a certain amount of maybe appropriation isn't the right word but, like in any kind of writing, there's always some kind of conversation happening, you know, between those kinds of giants of literature and the people that are trying to create you know literature.
Speaker 1:Now the question is then specifically like how do you create systems and rules and guidelines and etiquette for the ways to do it that feel right and that feel like they're productive and they're enabling creativity, as opposed to sort of restricting or constraining? Um, so and I think again, that's just a huge question that so many of us are actively like trying to tease out through the work we're doing, through projects, through collaborations with institutions and archives and estates and universities Um, and I think like that's, you know, that's that's kind of the upshot as we're trying to figure out, you know, through practice and through hands-on work, what makes sense and how to customize solutions, where needed, for different scenarios.
Speaker 2:Totally, and I love that reference that you talked about with bringing a poet who hasn't been around for a while but kind of admitting would he be okay with this or would he be stoked on this? Would he not? Um, like, or would he be stoked on this or would he not? Or like, would he do it begrudgingly, but would it be? You know, um, I guess I'm gonna toss a random, an idea I thought about out there while you were saying this. I'm curious if you guys have thought about it is, you know, as these large language models get better, would have y'all thought, uh, I think it would be really cool to source a large language model with the poet that is in question, uh, or that that you guys are wanting to solve the problem for all of their literary works, all of anything, anything published, goes into this large language model.
Speaker 2:In addition to the history of poetry, um, and all of the rules that have been used in the past, you know the, the present, what could be used in the future, and I mean, I hate to like simplify it to this like uh term, but like making like a, like a gpt of that poet with that knowledge, um, and it'd be like would you be okay with this? And then like that could be a cool, like little thought experiment, of like it may say no, I don't know, I just randomly thought about that while you're saying this. I'm like because you can create your own GPT models now, which is super interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I love that. I love that. That's what your brain does. That's where my brain always goes to so with I guess, like sort of two things but and I'll try to keep it like sort of close because I know we're coming down to the wire. But um, the first thing is that my my first project with bina 48, who I mentioned earlier uh, I think I mentioned that it was a poetry, sort of a mentorship of this robotic mind and a lot of the, a lot of the conceptual kind of hook of that project was how do you create kind of a customized language model that is specifically knowledgeable about poetry in the way that I think about poetry? Because there were canonical kind of poetry data sets that you could use and upload in order to fine tune a model like GPT-2.
Speaker 1:Fine-tune a model like GPT-2, but they were trained on, like you know, john Donne and Milton and Shakespeare and like the kind of the you know the great poets of history, but they didn't reflect any contemporary poetry and they didn't really kind of reflect contemporary free verse, and so that's why now, if you ask ChatGPT to write a poem for you, it does it in rhyming verse. If you ask chat GPT to write a poem for you, it does it in rhyming verse like always, and it kind of never, never deviates from that. So that, like that, was an experience for me where I kind of realized I mean, the limitations really in using these models come down to what, what's in the training data and what they've, what they've learned. So if all they've learned is a very narrow definition of poetry, that's what you're going to get. So that was sort of one takeaway from that project and that was in a lot of ways like the kind of the catalyst for what I'd done with technology, which is a bespoke version of a language model and it's various iterations now over time.
Speaker 1:But it started with customizing GPT-2 based on all of my own human writings and it was things like you know excerpts from ts elliot and other poems that were in the public domain and you know bits of uh like little thought starters that I'd written down but they weren't poems yet and I took all of that data and put all of that into a JSON file and made a training data set and use that and that became my collaborator and you know that was really specifically so that I'd have a model to write with that sounded more like me and that felt closer to the way that I think about poetry. Closer to the way that I think about poetry, and I also kind of trained it on things like, you know, a poem doesn't have to be rhyming couplets. A poem doesn't have to rhyme. A poem doesn't have to be in, you know, syllabic meter, it doesn't have to do X, y and Z. And so it actually became like this much bigger sort of philosophical question for myself of like, well, what is poetry? What is a poet? What is is a poem? How do I explain this to a non-human mind? Like, do I have to get down to the level of? You know, a poem can be, um, you know, like a piece of poetic language that you see on a billboard somewhere and it just stands out and it like becomes a little poetic moment versus something that you're reading in a textbook, and so, anyway, like I could go down the rabbit hole on this, but it was a huge sort of moment to realize that you know, there are all these different stages where you get better results and you get more of an interesting interaction and a more meaningful interaction when you are personalizing or customizing a model in this way. So that's what I've really been doing.
Speaker 1:You know, the bulk of my time working with AI has not been working with off-the-shelf models. It's always been kind of working with that fine-tuned version in very collaborative ways. And then to your point, you know there's a number of poets who've done things that are kind of you know what you're describing, and not just poets but writers to people like Mark America and David Javu Johnston, and you know there's not a lot, but there is definitely a few who've taken their own materials and kind of turn them into co-authors as well. And that was sort of the precursor of all the little AI assistants and things like that that are becoming very readily available through commercial products now. But I think that to me that's like always been the exhilarating potential of AI is to be able to create these very customized tools where you're like a painter mixing your own paint or like stretching your own canvas and creating your own materials, and just kind of setting up this environment in which a very particular kind of creativity is really encouraged or inspired. So that to me, is a super fascinating like piece of this.
Speaker 1:And I see more and more artists now, um, well, okay, maybe not tons, but there are. There are a number of really interesting artists who are using ai, but in this very, very personalized way and sort of creating um tool sets and tool kits and things that are really reflecting their own practice as an artist before an ai, and I think that's a that's an important piece of this too. There's a lot of people who, you know, are using AI to sort of create art for the first time, which is very different from having a voice or a style or a practice or, you know, kind of a clear point of view and then figuring out how to use the tools to change or transform or augment or expand that practice, which is, I hope, like what I've been trying to do as a writer.
Speaker 2:I love that. I mean, and just to be like super clear, like I have a set calendar date, I'm not or set calendar time, but that I have time so we can talk about a few more, unless you don't like that's.
Speaker 1:I wish, I wish, I wish. I could but I actually do have to jump off in a few moments. Um, I'm sorry, I do have like another conflict afterwards, but it's. This is so fun and I wish I could just keep chattering because it's a great.
Speaker 2:No worries at all I just wanted to make sure, yeah, I, because, like, I can keep going, uh, but I also know that, uh, yeah, there might, there definitely might be conflict. So, um, I want to, I want to wrap it up and I'm gonna, I need to pull up twitter to get their at, because I um saw that they recently won a um, a book of yours, um, and uh sanso, or they, they basically were gifted a book, oh, and so I reached out, just for full transparency. I wanted to do something really fun here. Uh, obviously, they they're a big fan of your work and I've always loved their contributions to space and some of their tweets and just the dialogue that they create. So I reached out to him and asked him, you know, like, what would be some questions that he would love to ask you. Oh, that's so cool.
Speaker 2:So I want to pull it up and I'll be reading a little bit from here. I want to make sure I got it up and I want to. I'll be reading a little bit from here. I want to make sure I got it. So it's kind of three questions that build on each other, so feel free to answer it in whatever way you see fit. Is what do you see as the future of AI art as AI becomes more powerful, Do we lose humanness altogether? Is there a way that AI can find interesting ways to help us explore humanness in its role as an outsider?
Speaker 1:Yeah, those are great questions and big questions also. Yes, I mean obviously I'll give a deeper answer, but yes to all of those because I mean I don't think I'd be using sorry, wait, no, the second one maybe isn't the right. I shouldn't say yes to that but I wouldn't be using AI if I didn't think that there was a good direction to go in. You know, with these tools. I'm using it because I personally find it really inspiring and useful and valuable and because I think it can also be useful and valuable, you know, to others as well.
Speaker 1:So, I think, to you know, to the first question, it kind of jumps off the point we were just discussing, which is, I think, that as we go forward, we'll continue to see more and more value coming from being able to take these tools and make them more nuanced and kind of figure out how to personalize them kind of much in the way that, um, you know, we as a culture transformed from, you know this idea of the computer as this like behemoth, you know room-sized machine. Now we have these little tiny personal computers that are really, you know, prophecies for us. That's kind of what's already happening and will continue to happen with ai. Is that we're.
Speaker 1:We're transitioning from this idea of ai as this behemoth entity and we're understanding like these this is an approach, it's a way of empowering individual inquiry or helping to kind of bolster imagination or, you know, empower a unique point of view. And I think that you know that's where a point of view, and I think that you know that's where a lot of the interesting stuff is going to happen in the art world Right now a lot of there's a lot of experimentation, a lot of just playing with new tools as they come out and, quite frankly, not a lot of like very I don't know like you know work beyond just kind of that novelty factor. And I think once we've all had a chance to think about it more and use this more and play more and get more adept and really kind of grapple with what it all means, that's when things will start to get really interesting. And I'm excited to sort of see what happens when we go beyond this idea of just, you know, generating imagery and like get much more um, complex and challenging, and it'll get much more exciting as, as we, as we move forward there. Um, okay, and then the second and third questions are like the big questions, right. So I mean, I think that for me, the the reason that I really do love working with intelligent systems. The reason that I am inspired by it is because it's opening up new creative realms that I don't think I would be able to access without it, and that's both enabled by the technology and it's also enabled by kind of the philosophical framework for the technology, and I think the same is true for crypto in a sense as well.
Speaker 1:But being able to use AI in this way has sort of made me realize, you know more and more about what it means to be a human poet writing, and has sort of made me look deeper into my own process and my own inspiration and the way that I put words together. As I am kind of figuring out more and more about how the systems work, it requires me thinking more and more about things like uh, what is a poem? How do I define what poetic language is To me like? What is a great poem? How do I put my finger on that ineffable quality that makes something you know powerful or emotional? So it's requiring me to go even more into like, what is the human quality? What are the things that make this art form so, so essential to us?
Speaker 1:And I think that's it's kind of moving in both directions at the same time we're we're figuring out how to translate this to the machine and we're figuring out how to articulate it better for ourselves, and I think that's something we can continue doing in tandem, um, not so much, you know, replacing um the human, but kind of using the tool to understand more about the human. I think that that's actually what happens with all technology, in a way. So there's, there's that piece of it. Um, you're gonna have to remind me, like, what I'm not answering, what I'm not responding to, because those were again like very big questions.
Speaker 2:Well, I guess the last is I think you touched on all of it because it was you know what do you see as the future of AI art? As AI becomes more powerful, Do we lose humanness altogether, and is there a way that the AI can find interesting ways to help us explore humanness and its role as an outsider, find interesting ways to help us explore?
Speaker 1:humanness and its role as an outsider. Um, yeah, yeah. So, and that in the last one, like yeah, I think you did touch on all of it.
Speaker 1:But, like I will say for the last one, I have been thinking a lot lately. It's just it's been coming up like in a lot of projects that I'm working on and a lot of conversations that I've had, but thinking about the difference between ai generated poetry and human poetry and kind of the different, you know, the aesthetic differences, but also like, maybe, the practical differences and the utilitarian differences and like what are we using human poetry for? What are we potentially going to be able to use machine generated poetry for? And I feel like there might actually be distinct categories and different applications that make all of it useful and worthwhile. And again, this is like, instead of you know, um outs, we don't want to outsource human poetry necessarily to these systems, but maybe maybe we can use these systems, um, to generate poetry for therapeutic, or we can use it to actually, you know, enable some kind of function that we know poetry is very good for but that maybe contemporary poetry isn't really prioritizing. So I think there's ways of also understanding where the capabilities of the technology enables it to do something with poetic language that it's particularly, you know, optimized for, and like that can be, that can be what the machine poets do, and then the human poets get to do more and more of what we love, and we just kind of, you know, do that with even more inspiration at our fingertips, I think, which is a really cool thing.
Speaker 1:And then, sort of, you know, looking beyond poetry, the thing that I really am always just so like stunned by and so excited by is the fact that these machines are sort of built to help us see things that we're not going to be able to see on our own, and sometimes that can be, you know, a weird poetic turn of phrase.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it can be like the answer to a research problem, um, sometimes, as I said before, it could be like, you know, a potential solution for some massive problem. Maybe it's like a, you know, a thought starter for a way to tackle some aspect of climate change, and I feel like there's lots of ways in which these machines that are built to generate um outputs can actually be used for ideation, for brainstorming, for problem solving on a really massive scale, and so that I think, with the third question, my like that's what I often kind of want to lean into is just how can we really kind of join forces and have, like the human vision and the human sort of intention and purpose, combined with the, the incredibly powerful ideation of these machinic partners, thought partners, and what can we do together that we can't do on our own? And I think there's lots of potential upsides to that in a lot of different disciplines and across many fields.
Speaker 2:Totally. I mean, I know we have to stop it here. I could talk to you for so much longer on this, but this has been phenomenal and I think the only thing I have to respond to that is that my definition of art, like what makes art great for me, is it helps people see in a new way, like it helps people see something they haven't seen before, and it helps usher in, usher that in, and so I think you just summed that up beautifully, like when you said, I was like, oh, it's literally what great art does. It helps you see, uh, something in a, in a way in which you hadn't been able to see it before, in a way we hadn't discovered.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, it's a great. That's kind of a great place to end, because that actually is like yeah, it's a lovely link between the two yeah, totally so well, we should, definitely we should keep talking because there's much more to unpack and I'm sorry I have to, I have to head off, but it's been really lovely chatting with you and got the wheels turning in my brain a bit. So thank you for the props.
Speaker 2:Totally for sure, yeah. And lastly, before you go and to respond, yes, there's so many more things that I want to talk to you about, and I hope to see you in New York. Yes, for sure. So I guess, just lastly, if you were to just part of always at the end.
Speaker 1:Where? Where do you want people to go if they want to learn more about you, your work? Where?
Speaker 1:would you want to point them to first. Oh, that's an easy question, you know why. Do with an easy one. My website is always a good place, so it's just SashaStylescom and it's, you know, twitter and Instagram. I try to keep like, pretty updated with various projects that I'm working on and events that are going on, so I just add Sasha Styles on both of those. And yeah, I mean if, for anyone who might be in New York or coming to New York for NFT NYC, there'll be a couple events that I'm participating in there, so I'll be posting about those on social media and it'll be great to obviously see you there and see anybody else who wants to swing by and we can continue some of these convos in person.
Speaker 2:I'd love nothing more. Well, sasha, I'm going to let you go and get to the rest of your life here tonight, but again, this has been phenomenal and just really appreciate not only your time but like just willingness to go down some tangents and some rabbit holes and just think through some like big questions that not only have I've had but clearly you've had as well. So I just really appreciate your time to like explore those with me. It's been an incredibly insightful chat.
Speaker 1:Likewise Truly a pleasure. Thank you so much you.