Spawning's Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst on How to Build Humane AI for Artists

It’s a twist of history that the AI revolution first reached mainstream attention via visual art, with DALL-E, and yet artists have been among the technology’s biggest critics. 

Ownership of intellectual property, fair compensation for work being used in training datasets, fear of having art’s essential quality polluted, and an unwillingness to be glorified product testers for what are seen as extractive Big Tech companies are just some of the concerns the art world has voiced. 

So, the question is, can AI be both humane and a transformatively powerful tool for artistic creation?

That is the riddle that lies at the heart of Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s work, both as acclaimed artists and as entrepreneurs behind Spawning, an AI company that is striving to create a “clean” open-source image generation model trained only on materials from the public domain.

Now, with Spawning readying the release of Public Diffusion, its most powerful image-generation tool yet, they are hoping to change the way the art world at large looks at the technology—and, beyond that, how we as a society think about the tradeoffs required to make it work.

In this episode, I am very pleased to talk to Holly and Mat about how they believe AI stands to impact art, and how they aspire to shape the art ecosystem to come.

This episode is supported by Digital Original.

About Digital Original

Digital Original is an art tech software solution designed exclusively for galleries. It enables them to create blockchain-secured digital counterparts of physical artworks equal in value and price to the original. 

With Digital Original, galleries can confidently enter the digital market, offering collectors an exclusive right to own digital art in a secure, speculator-proof format.