“An engine for the imagination”: an interview with David Holz, CEO of AI image generator Midjourney

“The kind of computing these LLMs are doing, this kind of intelligence, is just different. Is that an existential risk? Well, I come back to the fact that we have no idea how the human brain works.” It’s easier to imagine catastrophic things than see the opportunities, he points out.

But it’s not the image that you see,” Shan continues. “It’s the human emotion. It’s the feeling evoked in the audience.”

When I think about art and its relationship with generative AI, I find myself caught in a loop. If art is the human idea, then wouldn’t a human, typing a prompt into something like Midjourney, count as the human effort within the