In October 2023 I was invited to give a talk on Artificial intelligence at Kulturkraft in Copenhagen.

The talk was a broad sweep across the state of the technology covering consternation in the cultural sector, some of the questions around copyright and a look at the work of some of the artists working most closely with the technology, the brilliant Scott Eaton, Wolfe von Lenkiewicz and the late Harold Cohen , who’s pioneering work with AARON is being looked at in a retrospective at the Whitney in early 2024.

2 months later they asked me if I would follow up the talk with another one.

2 months is a long time in tech! In between October and December , the Actors (SAG) and Writers (WGA) strikes had both been resolved, preliminary rulings had been issued in the class action copyright dispute with Meta, both Open AI’s chap GPT and Google’s flagship LLM ‘Gemini’ had gone multi-modal ‘while Sam Altman, Open AI’s CEO had been fired and rehired.

Rather than go over the same ground, I invited the artist and Ai pioneer Wolfe Von Lenkiewicz to offer a practitioner’s perspective.

Wolfe is technically gifted, classically trained, steeped in art history and relentlessly inventive. When diffusion models first became publicly available in November 2022 he was amongst the first to adopt them in his practice , training them on his work and style, like 21st century magician’s apprentices.

The experience has profoundly influenced his work and practice. You can see more of it here Von Wolfe (@vonwolfe_) • Instagram photos and videos

The interview below is an edited version of a conversation we had on the subject. For brevity, my questions and comments have been removed and replaced with graphics.