Creative AI: Sarah Meyohas & Albert Read

0:03Only connect, urged the novelist Anne Foster. He wrote this more than a century ago. Today, those words resonate more powerfully than ever. Artists and creatives collaborating across disciplines, geographies, and perceptions are truly leading the way. So join us. Let's connect.

0:27Welcome to the third season of Chanel Connects. I'm Yana Peele, Global Head of Arts and Culture at Chanel. In this series, we bring together global changemakers from the worlds of food, film, art, architecture and beyond. Some are old friends and collaborators. Others are meeting for the first time. All are focused on what matters most and what happens next. And now we get to listen in.

1:07What is the nature of authentic creativity in a world of artificial intelligence? In this episode, we hear from artist Sarah Mayohas, whose practice explores the technologies that are transforming society. Sarah connects with Albert Reid, the managing director of Condé Nast Britain and author of The Imagination Muscle. His brilliant book is a guide to honing our human skills of creation in a complex and increasingly automated world. Together, they talk about originality, authorship, and the enduring power of the artist.

1:51So tell me, how would you define imagination? It's a very big question, and I've written a whole book about it. If I had to describe it in one sentence, I would say the imagination is this fertile space of the mind between chaos and order. There's also a quote I really like by T.S. Eliot, who wrote in his books, where he described it as connecting previously unconnected matrices of experience, making us understand what it is to be awake, to be living on several planes at once. And for me, that's a lovely definition of what imagining is, to be living on several planes at once. There's also a kind of higher level of imagination, which is the preserve of artists like you and poets, where there's this kind of miraculous fusion that takes place, where you have experiences, you have this imaginative palette of sources of information and ideas, and where you create something entirely new.

2:45But that really is a high level of imagination, really, that is the preserve of artists and poets. For me, one of the most interesting aspects of writing this book and researching it was to try and discover where we have ideas, how we have ideas, in what part of our day do we think most creatively. And for me, the spaces in between are these moments in the day when we're partially disengaged from our conscious mind. I mean, the obvious and famous examples are in the shower, going for a walk. These are moments in the day when we have ideas. Everybody has them. I think the task for those spaces is to make use of them, and if we have ideas, to write them down.

3:23I'm a great believer in writing things down, making notes, keeping a commonplace book in whatever form we do it, whether it's on paper or on a phone. So everybody has their own ways of doing things. But let me ask you a question, Sarah. Do you have these moments in the day, these spaces in between where you find that ideas come to you? Yeah, I think I consider spaces in between in multiple ways. The shower is definitely my place. I like to look at water droplets and I like to look at the rivulets of water that snake down the glass and to focus on really, really tiny details and kind of imagine that that is in itself an entire universe.

4:11Um, so the, the shift of scale there and the, you know, attention to something as minute as possible generally puts me in a very creative space. And also, as you said, it's a less analytical place, right, with the steam sort of around you and the noise, right, of water hitting the ground. So I've definitely taken extra showers for more than just the purpose of cleanliness. And then the other spaces in between, I think, and we'll get into this further, I think, is the spaces in between totally different fields, right? And the matrices of thought that intersect and drawing relationships between disparate spaces.

5:13I also think is, you know, other people have written about this, but I think I've tried to actively exercise that as a way of creating things that are truly unique because I'm drawing connections between spaces that nobody else is, you know, bothering to think about. Yes, I think that's such a fascinating area. And what I've written about a lot in the book is around this idea of originality and really trying to penetrate what originality means and looking at artists who are, on the face of it, the most original creators in history. And the one I talk about is Picasso when you talk about the Demoiselle d 'Avignon, which is this groundbreaking early 20th century painting, which is seen as the kind of beginning of modern art and really unleashing Cubism and all aspects of modernism.

6:09and of course it is wildly original but at the same time he's drawing from different sources he's drawing from Iberian face masks he's copying a bit Cezanne he's rooting through the ethnography in Paris and finding this incredible African art which at that point nobody had really thought of as a source of artistic inspiration so really for me the term I use is is creating this imaginative palette where you have sources and you're drawing from different areas in a way that nobody else is and the other example I write about is is Juan Manuel Miranda who wrote Hamilton and really this idea of this again this this breakthrough musical which was described as the most original you know musical for years is in some ways drawing on very conventional aspects of the musical he's He copies Jesus Christ Superstar.

7:02He copies Sweeney Todd. He brings in hip-hop. He brings in this biography of a founding father that none of us really thought about recently. So having all these elements on his imaginative palette at the same time allowed him to create Hamilton. Of course, other things played into that too. But to start with, you have to have this ability to draw from different sources. And that sounds to me like that's the way you think about it as well. And how much do you think about originality? How much do you care about it? How much do you worry about being original? Is it something that plays into your thinking a great deal or is it something that comes naturally?

7:40I don't think about it at all, actually. I think it's just a side effect of my curiosity and of my desires of what to create. Sometimes I feel like with my work I'm just fumbling in the dark and it's like a flashlight that the artwork almost is somewhat out of my hands and it's there and it's my job to kind of hack at it slowly and slowly until it becomes visible. But I'm not trying to think about originality. I'm aware of authorship. Uh, and that is something that's on my mind recently because, uh, I think it's almost unfair to different mediums that, um, that, that a human can have more or less of a claim of authorship on that medium.

8:40For example, with a painting, right, there's a very, very distinct claim of authorship and of originality. Authorship, auteur, you know, being an auteur. But for example, paper marbling, which is beautiful, has a very, you know, you can't really have such a claim of being an auteur. So much of it is, is constrained by the physics of that medium and by chance, right? That even if something comes out as, you know, a stunning piece of marbling, there's not so much authorship. And as a result, I think it's very linked to originality, right? There's not so much originality that can be displayed within that as a medium.

9:29Yes. And of course, originality, in a way, is a relatively modern concept. It really was thought of in a big way in the Romantic period. And the quest to be original, to do something new, was something that wasn't particularly familiar to Byzantine art or to Renaissance art to some degree. But with the Romantics, they were also in the midst of a technological revolution, right? Mechanical reproduction was really coming to knock on all of these crafts. And I think it's because of that that people started to think about originality. Yes, a reaction to mechanization. I think that's right. And they hated the industrial revolution.

10:14If you think of someone like Wordsworth, they were full of foreboding for what it represented and what it was doing to the soul, to the poetic soul, if you can call it that. Sarah, I'm interested in your background because you have this, I mean, it's not dissimilar to my background in the sense that you're coming from a world of business. You're an artist. You have a foot in both camps, as it were. How do you think that plays into your work? Yeah, I think it's played into my work in different ways over the years. At the very beginning, when I was still a grad student, I was very conceptually interested in the nature of value.

10:58And, you know, what is value? How do we define it? There was a French philosopher named Jean-Joseph Gou who wrote a book called Symbolic Economies. And he was basically looking at just broadly looking at economic concepts, but through a lens of psychoanalysis. And at the time, this was kind of my way in. And there was the thought that, you know, value only occurs in a moment of representation when something is in the place of the other. And that basic insight is what led to a number of pieces. First, it was Bitcoin, which was a conceptual performance piece where I forked Bitcoin, called it Bitcoin, backed it at a fixed rate by my photographs that were visual metaphors of a blockchain that I called speculations and other play on words.

11:55And that eventually, you know, foretold the, you know, the NFT boom. And another piece that was very also acutely engaged with value was a piece where I manipulated stocks on the New York Stock Exchange and gesturally redrew them on white canvases. And, you know, this was both also kind of like GameStop before GameStop, but fundamentally about using my ownership as a way of drawing. Right. And and the the fact that a market, right, is distilled to these points and these lines that are essentially exchanges between two participants creates a reality in itself that is not simply reflecting the underlying value.

12:48Right. Yeah. And would you say that the your work Cloud of Petals has this value idea coming out? Yeah, cloud of petals was essentially the turning point because cloud of petals in a way from the unconscious side of things, right, as we mentioned before, it really came from a dream, right? like this kind of idea of a cloud of petals and petals as pixels. And I was reading Juliana Bruno, who had written about surfaces, and there was something about petals as these bits of color that you could really clearly imagine in your mind, right? Because it's actually flowers you can imagine much more vividly in your mind's eye than like an elephant.

13:37And so the cloud of petals was just sort of this dream. And then I thought about, you know, then I was thinking more in the worldly way about photography as data, as bits of information. I was thinking about the Google scanning project and how there had been this kind of sublime attempt to scan all of the pages of all of the books. And when you looked online, you could see these little fingers popping in of all of the people behind the scenes who were really helping to make this happen. And so Cloud of Petals was was a performance piece. It was performing the labor of this data collection, right, of a frivolous data set.

14:22you know, the most frivolous and useless of all these, you know, rose petals and to create this cloud and not in the former Bell Labs of all places, right, where the, you know, the birthplace of technology took place and for what purpose, right, for an AI that could replicate rose petals forever, right, emancipate ourselves from this kind of physical reality and live in the cloud. and the you know it's a question right what is gained and what is lost you're you're experiencing something that could never could never have been experienced before and uh is there anything lost in the scent right or in touch which is very much in the in the performance there's there's so much around touch and um but it's just a new reality uh and it's and in some ways these pieces were all pushing trends I was seeing, whether it was crypto or retail trading or data and AI to a total extreme to then show us, right, what reality would then be.

15:35And that, you know, then kind of that has actually come to pass, right, in all of those cases. It's funny, isn't it, how we're entering of world or time when we're getting to really see the very, very small and the very, very big. I talk about observation in the James Webb Space Telescope, capturing these first images of the furthest outer space you can imagine, and these wonderful works of what seem like incredible art of these faraway galaxies. And then we have this very, very precise, minute precision observation of these tiny things that you're talking about. I find it so interesting that we're doing both at once and they both seem to be happening at the same time.

16:23Yeah, it's kind of the human reach expanding, right? Yes, yes, inwards and outwards. You also have a background in business, but you've devoted it to writing, editing, magazines, culture. Or how does your background inform your work? I've always sort of dwelt at the intersection of art and commerce and always, while occupying one, longing for the other and more than the other, longing for the first one. So there's always been this tension, a good tension in my life between wanting to be creative and wanting to do things that make money and to run businesses and to manage teams and to do things with a larger group.

17:09and I think really it's been a very fulfilling aspect of my life that I've been able to do both. I've worked with and continue to work with very imaginative people, with editors of famous brands like Vogue and Wired and all sorts of other titles that we publish at Condé Nast. I think the things that I've learned are two things. One is the imagination of the entrepreneur, the business person, the imagination of the artist, the imagination of the scientist, they're all the same thing. They're all the minds that can make leaps into the unknown, that can make unlikely connections, as we were saying earlier, the minds that can occupy different spaces simultaneously.

17:53And the element of it for me that I find so interesting is, and I try and develop it myself, is this idea of being a beginner. As you get on in life in a certain role, in a certain job, you can quite easily get channeled into a furrow of thought and a furrow of a worldview. And really the people who succeed in life are those who manage to retain this beginner's mindset. And one very interesting element of that is that there's a tendency for Nobel Prize winners in science to have side interests in art. And you'd look at Isaac Newton, who was a painter and a poet, and Humphrey Davy, who invented the incandescent light bulb.

18:33He also edited College of Wordsworth's lyrical ballads. You have this mind occupying both spaces at the same time. And Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, was also a member of something called the Chelsea Arts Club in London. And he was not a very good artist, but he was nonetheless an artist. And the same with Richard Feynman, the particle physicist. He was also an artist. And I find this idea that keeping your mind fresh is so important and so easily neglected. And for me, doing business and something creative at the same time, each one keeps me fresh in the other space. There's a good quote by Steve Jobs, who I cover in the book.

19:15And he had this, what you might think of as a setback in his career when he was fired from Apple. He'd had his first round at Apple. and he spoke later of being dismissed and he said, I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could ever have happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter into one of the most creative periods of my life. So this is something that I feel very strongly about and something that when I'm in my business with my business hat on and people say, oh, they have an idea, And I think to myself, we tried that idea five, ten years ago.

19:57And I stopped myself because, you know, the world has changed. The world keeps changing. So an idea that may not have worked before may be relevant today. It's very difficult to absorb. But really the people who succeed over a long period of time have this openness, this ability to imagine that they could be wrong. Sarah, I want to ask you something else. You have worked a lot with AI. And I know you've been involved with AI companies at very early stages. Can you tell us about that? Goodness. Well, when I did the Cloud of Petals project, I had this huge data set of 100 ,000 images. And I worked with a few researchers who were building a startup.

20:37They were building a startup to help people train models. And I was one of their biggest data sets that they used. And that's how I initially trained the petals. And then they, you know, immediately got acquired by Microsoft and three years later got spun out as one of Microsoft's offerings. And I, you know, subsequently then, you know, invested in some AI companies, some, you know, like Adept, which is now a pretty major player. I was also in touch with OpenAI pretty early on. And this is quite interesting because in 2019 even, I heard that they started working on text-to-image models. And I started sending text to them, I think it was, yeah, in 2019, to get images back.

21:32And the framework that I had for thinking about it actually was like ekphrastic writing, right? And this like long, beautiful history. And I was sending poetry. And the images I was getting back were just so noisy and truly unusable. And so I didn't do anything with it. But then as soon as these new models came out, I was one of the first users of MidJourney. I spoke for hours with the founder when he was just starting up. I, in fact, tried to invest in it and they never ended up accepting any investment. So I was one of the first users of Midjourney. And then I kind of realized the framework for thinking about the relationship, the semantic relationship of text to images is not ekphrastic writing at all.

22:15It's the search bar. And we're not creating images. We're searching for them. And this is also fundamentally different than, for example, the model that I used for Cloud of Petals, right? The model that I used for Cloud of Petals is called a GAN, and it really mimics the input pretty much as accurately as it can. In that sense, it's not imaginative at all. Whereas text-to-image is stable diffusion, which is a different model and has a lot more randomness and chance built into it. It's interesting to think about how these AI systems were developed in the first place and their reliance on language is first and foremost.

23:08And where did that come from? Stock photography. Right. Stock photography already started doing the work of devaluing images, but it did it by at first making them searchable. And that was through language. Right. The earliest stock photography archives, they were like index cards. Right. And so that was a monetizable archive. Now, there's a paradigm shift where it's like the web is this free information to be mined at scale. And at this point, the image itself has no value. What has value is the statistical weights that make these models searchable. And that has value. The side effect is that styles become these kind, everything becomes a style, right?

24:04Van Gogh's a style, photography's a style, everything's a style. And the result of these models is that you kind of get this stock photography meets surrealism, right because the the visual language is so reliant on whatever is the biggest amount of data and the way you're searching for it is very much in line with the with this almost surrealist mindset right of of the unconscious as this kind of linguistic like exquisite corpse kind of game and so you can make these mashups uh very easily but in the end they're just mashups right in the end, AI, tell me if you agree with this, AI has this unparalleled ability to cast its net and observe intensely what's out there, but it can't yet produce something original, going back to our earlier point.

25:03It's still a mashup. It's still something that is confected. When I see the images of AI produced, as you say, they have a certain consistency to them. They're sort of slightly garish, there's a glow, the color's always teal, and there's a sort of, there's a kind of similarity. I just wonder whether we will have the breakthroughs in art that we've had in history through AI, or whether we still will rely on the human, this mystical element of the imagination of this something that is deep inside us that we can't still fully understand to take us to the next phase in arts history? I think we will.

25:44I am not nervous for art. I am nervous for designers and illustrators and animators. I'm nervous for them, but I'm not nervous for art. And I think that we will be trained. Photography is a quite interesting medium or as a framework for me to jump off of. And it's always been partly, you know, the relationship to optics, but also because our eyes, we're all so trained in photography, right? We can read photographs really very well. And this is going to happen with AI too. You're going to be able to recognize, you know, these different styles and they're going to seem unoriginal at some point, right?

26:30I think I find myself having, I can play the pessimist and the optimist when it comes to AI. I think AI and the creative industries. I think, as you say, I think on the pessimistic front, AI is like a rising tide which is beginning to cut it, to eat into the activities and the jobs of people at the sort of lower, lower down to the hierarchy of imaginative work. But then you could also argue in a more optimistic vein that AI is going to open up all sorts of channels of opportunity and it's going to allow for rapid experimentation with new tools that weren't previously available. So if you're a video games designer or if you're a special effects person doing stuff for movies, it completely upends the economics of that and allows people who wouldn't previously have access to those worlds to suddenly play in those spaces and will produce fascinating results.

27:26I mean, the saying that's going around at the moment is your job won't be replaced by AI, but it will be replaced by somebody who is working with AI. So I think that is the difference. Thank you so much for talking with me. I really, really loved it. Albert, likewise. I'm quite inspired to think of imagination in such a focused way of really valuing it. Good. Great to meet you. Yeah, likewise.

28:00This was Chanel Connect Season 3. It's been great having you with us. Don't forget to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Revisit conversations from the first two seasons with guests including Tilda Swinton, Kehinde Wiley, G-Dragon, Keira Knightley, and Grimes.

28:35Thank you.