AI is a tool. And a tool is a reflection of who uses it.

Can we have an honest conversation about AI, having lived through the last twenty years with the internet and social media, divorced of the people who are behind it and the market forces within which it is being cultivated and grown?

AI is shaping the world in profound ways, but especially for the creative community I think there is a lot of uncertainty about how we're thinking about it and how we're using it. So, what we're doing here is part of a larger collective conversation about the possibilities, the challenges, and the roles we want AI to play in our life.

The biggest changes in my life came from radical changes - both in my life and in my art

This isn't the end, it's the beginning.

I work directly in the codebase. I use AI to prototype, design and build every day. I explore ideas in real time, not after handing off to engineering.

The 20th century is shaped by cold war competition and multinational corporations. This century, it's going to be shaped by small groups of people in group chats plotting conspiracies and then launching on main for real. (I mean, the White House does it.)

To date, creative people have always sat at somebody else's table. That's all we do. We're looked at as charity or we're looked at as a financial asset that can be exploited. That's really the two modes or like free entertainment. But this is ours. This is something that we can truly build and that we can interface with the world. Not being this weak, little artist, creative person, but something with real stature and standing that is legitimate, that is important, whose work has value, and is going to be seen increasingly that way in society at large.

But this is the platform for creative people to not just be on our own, to not be 1099 NPCs, to not be 18th century traveling peddlers, but for us to be real participants and players in culture and our economy. And we're going to crush it at this. We are.

There's nothing here that's truly mind-blowingly novel. However, this is not a set of capabilities that creative people have had until now. This ability to create shares, create equity, to generate real collective wealth, and value from their work.

You could think of the artist corporation as a company is like a corp, except it's made specifically for how creative people do things.

My hope is that Metalabel can similarly be a form that helps people follow the same journey I've gone through of just 'sad boy' to 'squad boy'.

How do I get money to make my thing? And the wall we've been running up to is like there's five institutions that might consider us. Everybody's trying to go there. everyone else trying to go there is more credentialed than us. Why even try? We give up. Instead of that wall, Kickstarter just built a door there. It's just a door. And it instantly felt obvious. People stream through. It's almost $10 billion that's changed hands for people's ideas, 15, 16 years later.

But this is not just a crisis point. It's a turning point. It's an inflection point. Because, by the end of this century, creative people are going to be the wealthiest and most powerful group of all.

Creative people are excluded from the full benefits of capitalism. So, the greatest benefit of capitalism is collective wealth creation. You don't just make money from your own labor. You're part of something bigger. Where is that for creative people?

So, an artist is self-employed, self-expression. A creator is self-employed, commercial expression. Remember, creativity is about commercial applications of things. And you know a creator is working within platforms and generally working directly for pay. A commercial artist is commercially-employed, commercial expression. And then "creative," a term that I hear people under 25 use to describe creative people. Don't do it.

Creativity was a concept (and even a word) invented in the 1940s by a United States Defense Department research grant to try to find divergent thinkers to be officers in the military. And to solve a widespread concern among social scientists at the time which is that they were noticing that Americans in early capitalism were unhappy.

...reject life's lemons and make something better for yourself entirely.

Njerëzit sot kanë frikë të kenë një sens pronësie, identifikimi me vendin e tyre dhe me veten e tyre.

We all know with AI it's been a very powerful tool. And I haven't really used any of the visual stuff. I've only use ChatGPT to just kind of stir thinking, to really deep dive into conceptualizing.

As creatives, as we move into this highly robotic space, where we may not be driving our cars, we may not be cleaning our homes, our financials are almost already fully automated. Make AI your friend as you step into the next phase of your life. Use environments like CreativeMornings and educational platforms to be courageous.

How do we as artists work in parallel with AI and what does this mean for the future of creativity?

I should preface this by saying we are not trying to convince anybody of either side. This is not a debate to see who wins. We're just presenting perspectives.

I've been using AI as a co-creator in order to develop better concepts, better performances… because I want to be more efficient.

Now is the time to really make a difference, to start to learn about AI, and understand these tools and to see how what you can make of it.