Severin Matusek

“Well, actually, the important part is the creation of the system”. The constraints of the system that produce infinite media are where the action happens. Who’s responsible for the aesthetic regime of Instagram? Is it people using Instagram, or is it the person who shaped the mechanics of the platform who determines that, if you show your face or... See more

In fact, I’d like to propose something that sounds almost heretical in certain artistic circles: Prompt engineering, the act of crafting input to coax a desired output from an AI, may soon be regarded as a legitimate artistic medium. In the same way photography became an expressive form in its own right, so too might the process of collaborating... See more

As artist and AI collaborator Refik Anadol says, “This is pure collaboration , imagination with a machine.”

Today, the artistic prompt typed into a chatbot is itself becoming a form of expression. The difference between a clunky query and an inspired one is as wide as the gap between a finger painting and a Van Gogh. Ask an LLM to “write a poem about sadness,” and you’ll get bland, derivative, sentimental drivel. It takes skill and creativity (not to... See more

The artists take a pragmatic stance—what Herndon calls the “sexy middle ground”—in debates around A.I. and tech. “We’ve been doing this forever,” her husband adds. “And then the culture war emerged on either side of us.” The pair don’t evangelize for godlike silicon intelligence, nor will they be smashing the machines. They also believe that... See more

This is tragic. The loss of friction deprives people of something crucial. What happens between imagination and creation is ineffable—it entails struggle, iteration, joy, and frustration, disappointment, and pride. It is the process through which we enact agency. It is how we make meaning and move through the world. To lose that, I fear, is to... See more

Generative AI is disruptive, is transformative, and is reducing friction, but the economic incentives for using it are geared far less toward supercharging human potential and much more toward producing abundant slop.