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AI, Artists, and the Future of Creative Work from Life, Automated | Close All Tabs Presents

AI can quickly generate new images, stories, and songs. Life, Automated explores what this means for human creators.
Jess LoveMorgan SungMaya CuevaPauline BartoloneChris EgusaChris Hambrick
Image of a female robot, AI-Da, standing behind a black table scattered with art supplies: white paper with a half-finished painting of flowers, sitting on top of a clear acrylic stand; ten pots of paint, also on top of a clear acrylic stand; a stack of three books; a finished portrait of a face inside a clear protective sleeve; a stack of pamphlets, the top one reading, “AI-Da Robot.” AI-Da has a blank expression with her mouth slightly ajar, black, chin-length hair, and visible robotic parts that make up her arms. She’s wearing a teal sleeveless shirt and dark grey denim overalls. Her elbow rests on the stack of books as she dips a paintbrush into a pot of blue paint in front of her. Behind AI-Da is a clothesline, with four of her artworks hanging on it, inside clear protective sleeves. The artwork is glitchy-looking — to the left of the image is what seems to be a self-portrait and towards the center is a tree. All of this is inside of a wooden shed-like structure. AI-Da and the shed are tinted blue.
KQED podcast Life, Automated explores what the rise of generative AI means for human artists and creative work.  (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images; Edited by Maya Cueva)

View the full episode transcript.

While the Close All Tabs team churns out our next few episodes, we bring you this must-listen from Life, Automated. Generative AI is able to conjure new images, stories, and songs at lightning speed. So what does this mean for humans artists, storytellers and musicians? 

Life, Automated Host Jess Love explores what happens when AI enters creative markets. We learn that, at least today, key bottlenecks prevent AI from replicating some aspects of creativity. But there’s no guarantee those bottlenecks will exist tomorrow, raising vital questions about what we value in human labor.

Life, Automated is a series about how to live, work and make decisions in a world increasingly shaped by machines. It is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and it is distributed by KQED.

Host and Senior Director: Jess Love
Producer:  Steven Jackson 
Senior Producer: Jesse Dukes
Music: Steven Jackson
Associate Producer: Stacia Sliger
Recording: George Christensen, Will Feeney
Promotional help from Ananya Mallapragada and Charlotte Simmons.

Guests:

  • Ben Jones, economist, co-director of the Ryan Institute on Complexity 
  • Sam Goldberg, assistant professor of marketing, Stanford
  • Yevgenia Nayberg, artist, illustrator, children’s book author

Further Reading/Listening:

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Episode Transcript

A full transcript will be available 1–2 workdays after the episode’s publication.

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