THE GRAIN: AI vs. Creativity

Listen now to THE GRAIN with Ronit Novak, as I launch Season 2 of my podcast probes into the pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creativity—recorded at Made Human Studios in the Little Jamaica neighbourhood of Toronto, Canada.

Links to some stuff we talk about…

* n-v-r: The Department of Never Been Done Before

* Dré Labre’s portfolio website

* Design Fiction Daily: Dré Labre newsletter on Substack

* The Artifact Scanner: a handheld tool designed to unlock new possibilities

* Voidz: This is Where Reality Ends—an AI artist based in Toronto

* Dara Vandor: Imaginary Friends photo booth project

* Chairman Ting art and design studio

* Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million (March 2021)

Stay tuned for more grains of thought about creative futurism in the newsletter.Read more about THE GRAIN at this link and get in touch at [email protected].You should also follow @thegrain.ai on Instagram and LinkedIn and Substack.

The past year brought a wave of AI news that had major impact on the creative industry. In this roundup episode, it’s me on the mic, giving you my roundup of the biggest news events of 2024 and how they impacted our creative world. Plus, my grains of thought on how these topics will evolve.

For more info on the stories in this episode...

AI vs. News and Media

* Who's suing AI and who's signing: Publisher deals vs. lawsuits with generative AI companies [Press Gazette]

* The new Person of the Year chatbot explained [Time Magazine]

AI vs. Film

* What is Sora for? Commentary by Alex Kantrowitz [The Wrap]

* What if AI is actually good for Hollywood? [New York Times Magazine]

AI vs. Music

* Viral 'BBL Drizzy' AI Drake diss track company gets sued [CNN]

* 'BBL Drizzy' foretold the future of AI music [Wired]

AI vs. Climate

* AI wants more data. More chips. More real estate. More power. More water. More everything [Bloomberg Markets]

* Will AI save the planet? Why the evidence is flawed [The Conversation]

AI vs. the United States of America

* How Trump's new 'AI czar' David Sacks went from MAGA critic to true believer [NBC News]

* 1 in 6 congresswomen targeted by AI-generated sexually explicit deepfakes [Gizmodo]

AI vs. Reality

* Why doesn't Facebook just ban AI slop like Shrimp Jesus? [Business Insider]

* 'Brain rot': Oxford word of the year 2024 reflects 'trivial' use of social media [The Guardian]

Stay tuned for a special episode of THE GRAIN Podcast: Ask an AI Ethicist. Send your questions and we’ll present them to Cindy Pham, who’s worked on artificial intelligence ethics at companies like Scotiabank and Sony. [email protected]

For news and insights on how AI is impacting the creative industry, sign up for THE GRAIN Newsletter.

Read more about THE GRAIN at this link and get in touch at [email protected].

Follow @thegrain.ai on Instagram and LinkedIn and Substack.

Click here to catch up on Part 1 of my conversation with Stephen Marche.

Listen now to THE GRAIN with Ronit Novak, as I continue my series of podcast probes into the pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creativity—recorded at Made Human Studios in the Little Jamaica neighbourhood of Toronto, Canada.

Part 2 of my conversation with Stephen Marche delves deeper into the mysteries unknown potential of AI and what that means for creativity. Our conversation expanded my mind, and I think it will for you too. Here are links for further research into some of the topics we discussed:

* Was Linguistic AI Created by Accident? [The New Yorker]Marche’s 2024 article about what the ‘T’ in GPT stands for and why AI researchers are still baffled by it.

* Lawmakers passing the buck on non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes are running out of time. [THE GRAIN]My grain of thought from this past summer on the increasing prevalence of sexually explicit deepfakes, the damage they cause, and what can be done to stop them.

* The Filmmaker Who Says AI is Reparations. [Wired]Willonius Hatcher argues that AI is a form of equity for struggling artists who lack access to big studios, budgets, and connections.

Stay tuned for AI vs. 2024, a podcast roundup of the AI newsmaker moments that impacted the creative industry in this past year, along with my grains of thought on what’s in store for 2025.

For news and insights on how AI is impacting the creative industry, sign up for THE GRAIN Newsletter.

Read more about THE GRAIN at this link and get in touch at [email protected].

Follow @thegrain.ai on Instagram and LinkedIn and Substack.

Listen now to THE GRAIN with Ronit Novak, as I continue my series of podcast probes into the pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creativity—recorded at Made Human Studios in the Little Jamaica neighbourhood of Toronto, Canada.

Links to some stuff we talk about…

* Death of an Author. Stephen Marche’s AI generated novella [Pushkin]Using ChatGPT and Cohere’s LLM models, this provocative literary work blends human creativity with AI-generated prose.

* We’re Witnessing the Birth of a New Artistic Medium [The Atlantic]While experimenting with negative weighted prompts, Swedish musician Supercomposite inadvertently created Loab, one of the most novel and disturbing AI generated images yet.

* Jenny Holzer: Light Line exhibition [Guggenheim New York]This landmark artist fragments and re-contextualizes text to create new meanings that bend space, history, and truth.

Stay tuned for AI vs Meaning with Stephen Marche Part 2, and for my grains of thought about literature and language in the newsletter.

Coming this month, a podcast roundup of newsmaker AI moments that impacted the creative industry in 2024, and what’s in store for 2025.

Read more about THE GRAIN at this link and get in touch at [email protected].

Follow @thegrain.ai on Instagram and LinkedIn and Substack.

Creative professionals, including those of us in media, have become accustomed to hearing that our jobs may soon be replaced by artificial intelligence.

Ronit Novak’s new podcast THE GRAIN is encouraging honest conversations in the creative community—from filmmakers to those in advertising, design and photography – about the impact of AI on their careers.

She joins this episode of Broadcast Dialogue—The Podcast from Made Human Studios in Toronto’s Little Jamaica to talk about why creatives need to start talking openly about AI and the future of creativity.

Listen now to THE GRAIN with Ronit Novak, as I continue my series of podcast probes into the pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creativity—recorded at Made Human Studios in the Little Jamaica neighbourhood of Toronto, Canada.

Links to some stuff we talk about…

* Una Janićijević’s art and design website [unaart.com]She engages with collaborators and communities to tell compelling stories and champion underrepresented narratives

* How the sparkles emoji became the symbol of our AI future [Wall Street Journal]“From a design perspective, the sparkle in my mind is meant to feel like magic, and that is what AI feels like”

* Why does AI art look like that? [The Atlantic]Ironically, all of these explanations suggest that the uncanny scenes we associate with AI-generated imagery are actually a reflection of our own human preferences, taken to an extreme

Stay tuned for further grains of thought about art and design in the newsletter.

Read more about THE GRAIN at this link and get in touch at [email protected].

You should also follow @thegrain.ai on Instagram and LinkedIn and Substack.

Listen now to THE GRAIN with Ronit Novak, as I continue my series of podcast probes into the pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creativity—recorded at Made Human Studios in the Little Jamaica neighbourhood of Toronto, Canada.

Links to some stuff we talk about…

* Sora: First Impressions with the debut of ‘Air Head’ by Shy Kids [OpenAI]”What excites us is its ability to make things that are totally surreal. A new era of abstract expressionism”

* What Sora AI-generated videos look like combined with real-world actors and locations [No Film School]A look at how ‘Deflated’ by Shy Kids combined generative AI with traditional filmmaking

* Pressman Film developing Shy Kids’ ‘AUTOBiOGRAPHY’ [Deadline]When this compassionate AI connects with the internet the exponential expansion of its cognition leads to an existential crisis that propels it on a spiritual journey of self-discovery

Stay tuned for further grains of thought about filmmaking in the newsletter.

Read more about THE GRAIN at this link and get in touch at [email protected].

You should also follow @thegrain.ai on Instagram and LinkedIn and Substack.

Listen now to THE GRAIN with Ronit Novak, as I build my series of podcast probes into the pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creativity—recorded at Made Human Studios in the Little Jamaica neighbourhood of Toronto, Canada.

Links to some stuff we talk about…

* Ian Mackenzie takes creative reins at McCann Worldgroup [Campaign Canada]Mackenzie oversees all creative work for the network’s creative operations in Canada—and serves as McCann’s global AI creative lead

* How the ad industry Is making AI images look less like AI [Wall Street Journal]“It’s a back-and-forth conversation with technology and technology experts, but against a unifying and evolving creative vision that really involves layers,” said Ian Mackenzie

* The evolution (and navigation) of the ‘Black Elevation Map’ [Strategy]It reveals where Black-owned businesses and cultural institutions are most likely to be present or absent

Stay tuned for further grains of thought about advertising in the newsletter.

Read more about THE GRAIN at this link and get in touch at [email protected].

You should also follow @thegrain.ai on Instagram and LinkedIn and Substack.

THE GRAIN host Ronit Novak talks photography with Boris Eldagsen and Miles Astray, two international image artists whose recent contest pranks sparked debate on what makes a photograph real.

Check out the fresh trailer ahead of the first four weekly episodes starting October 8. And stay subscribed to THE GRAIN on Substack (and beyond!) for discourse about the pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creativity.Read the press release with details on upcoming episodes.

I'm Ronit Novak. I'm an art director and photo editor. I'm a mentor, a teacher, a writer, and I'm a public speaker. Just like you, I've been increasingly curious about the conversations surrounding creativity and artificial intelligence.

I wonder about the impact it will have on my career in the creative industry and everyone else's. I created THE GRAIN to be a platform for meaningful conversations with critical thinkers and to share them with you. The AI world is full of opportunists who are saying that there is a better, cheaper way to do what creatives do.

It's leading artists to freak out about losing their jobs. I want those artists to stop and think, to stabilize, and to remind themselves of their inherent creative value. THE GRAIN is for creative industry professionals, schemers and dreamers, and anyone who wants to think about the evolution of our endeavours.

Whether you're a consumer or producer—or on both sides of that fence—there's no better time to share than when change is in the air. I can't pretend to know what's going to happen in the future, but I'm keeping tabs on what's happening today. I'm reading articles every day, and I'm writing down my insights and grains of thought that you'll get in a weekly newsletter. You'll read in my newsletters and hear in my podcast that THE GRAIN is not about threats or trinkets or tech. It's about the shared experience of adapting to a new era.

THE GRAIN is not a sales pitch and is not hyping new AI tech developments. It's human-made, with real people telling their stories. Listen to THE GRAIN wherever you get podcasts for in-person conversations with industry experts recorded at Made Human Studios in Toronto. Subscribe to THE GRAIN newsletter for regular updates on how artificial intelligence is impacting our creative industry.Read the press release with details on upcoming episodes.