“Sensation in the Age of A.I.: Redefining the Conversation around Art” | PhotoVogue Festival 2023: What Makes Us Human? Image in the Age of A.I.

All of you,

and a bit sad that this is the last panel

of these days together.

And

well, I m glad

to finish the festival with

all these incredible people on stage,

some very good friends

and others that I really respect for their work.

So let me introduce you to Francesco Bonami,

incredible curator and writer.

And we can say the same of Hans Ulrich.

And then we have the most talented creative director

I have ever known,

which is Ferdinando Verderi,

Gea Politi, who s the editor in chief and publisher

of Flash Art.

We all grew up with it

and has done so much for,

to let us know the art scene.

And then we just, I hope all of you listened

to Charlie s

lecture.

It was so interesting.

I think he raised so many points

and no one spoke about before

for instance, about pollution and AI,

which it s a concept that is maybe difficult to grasp at.

Well, you know, the title of this panel is

Sensation in the Age of AI.

Now, we actually spoke with Ferdinando when we wanted to,

I was trying to think of a title

for this panel.

And we were both thinking

how the exhibition Sensation was

has been so important for us in our life

and how it changed our perspective

towards things.

So first, before asking all of you is

I wanna ask the audience

if you have seen the exhibition Sensation

back in the 90s,

you know what it is?

Raise your hands.

No.

There, gosh.

Everyone s a baby.

So I mean, this is like, I feel so old

because I think,

no, actually I think Sensation

has been really so important

in defining what s the meaning of groundbreaking

and what art could do that

I wanted to ask all of you

I mean, when you saw Sensation,

how you felt about the exhibition

and why do you think it was groundbreaking?

Maybe I wanna start with you, Ferdinando.

I was in high school or something

so I would ask Hans Ulrich

or Francesco if,

what that exhibition really meant

for people who were already active in the industry.

Does it work?

Good evening.

Well, we are just talking about

how many artists survived that exhibition.

Very few.

Maybe he was trying to find more than,

he say five, but he couldn t arrive more than three.

So that show is not a good example

for artificial intelligence

because if that s the same destiny would happen

to artificial intelligence in,

when was Sensation in?

[Alessia Glaviano] 97. 1997,

so many years ago?

[indistinct chatter]

So it s probably that.

26. 26,

in 26 year artificial intelligence would not exist

any longer, you know?

Posthuman, there s some.

Posthuman was another exhibition that was

very far-seeing.

You know, I always think that when you think

about the future, particularly,

let s take the best example, Star Wars.

It becomes really dated, you know?

When they try to think the future.

[Gea Politi] Or Strange Days.

In material terms, the material get dated

so the idea get dated.

So the best sci fiction is Philip Dick,

that it doesn t think about material

but I think about psychology in the future

and when you think how the human mind change in the future.

So

nobody really thought about an iPhone

in Star Wars, you know?

And that was the future because it changed

completely the behavior of people into the future.

So artificial intelligence,

first of all, we are talking with him before,

he has also small text he wrote about artificial stupidity.

If we don t produce artificial stupidity,

we will never be able to understand artificial intelligence

because now is me that I m stupid and he is intelligent,

you are intelligent,

so you can compare too intelligence against stupid.

So you can understand what is intelligent

and what a stupid person.

I can say that I m a stupid person

because yesterday I went to the urologist

and for a checkup

and in the same study, [speaks foreign language],

there was, they were giving the COVID booster for free.

So every time I find a free vaccine

without going online and register, I take it.

So I took it, even if my doctor told me,

Don t take the vaccine again

because you get already six,

maybe a seven is not good for you.

And he was right because yesterday I almost died

for the booster of the COVID vaccine.

That s the proof, scientific proof of my stupidity, so.

Plus you ve been already,

last year you weren t good for the COVID vaccine.

So artificial intelligence,

we ll see in few years if artificial intelligence

really works on.

Right now, I think that artificial intelligence,

like Sensation and Posthuman is very dated

with the difference,

or like Star Wars,

that while Star Wars, Sensation and Posthuman

were using materials of the,

of a possible future that never really

came true,

artificial intelligence use material of the past.

So the best picture made from artificial intelligence

that looked like done by Nadar, you know?

They don t tell anything about the future.

They tell everything about the past.

But I have a question then for all of you.

Okay, so we say artificial intelligence,

anything that it does would be derivative

because it does, you know,

actually takes from everything that it s already out there.

But isn t this something that is happening everywhere?

Is like, isn t everything has been done

and whatever happens next is a bit derivative?

And I wanted to kind of go back to

your question from before and you know,

I think in a way if we look at some historic exhibition,

which is kind of relevant

in relation to the AI conversation,

there is maybe one example which is Les Immatériaux, no?

And it was kind of interesting when Jean-François Lyotard

did this show in the late 70s

and that s probably, you know, an example

cause it connects also to technology.

He was curating a show

for the Centre Georges Pompidou

at the beginning of the Pompidou

and it was really the first time kind of the internet,

you know, it was even kind of the internet

before the invention of the internet

got introduced to an exhibition.

Because basically, you know,

the artists and the scientists in the exhibition were

connected through a kind of an intranet of some sort.

The artists all and the scientists got a computer.

Daniel Buren told me the other day, you know,

he didn t know what arrived in the post.

There was this very strange object

because nobody at that time knew what was a computer,

you know, in the art world.

And then, you know, a technician came to his home

and, you know, introduced that idea.

And, you know, there was a kind of a remake the other day

and certain of these works were revisited.

And I think it is interesting to think about, you know,

Les Immatériaux as a show which happened

at the very beginning

which reflected on this idea of the network

and you know, and what that could mean in relation to AI.

So if you want a historic exhibition, no,

from the past which is relevant,

I think it will probably be Les Immatériaux, yeah.

Thank you, no, but you know I was referring to Sensation

not just, not because I think that it s in relation to AI

but more of I mean, the effect that had

on us being young at the time.

I, in the 90s I used to live in New York

and I remember I was quite shocked by that exhibition

cause I, it is not like an art person.

I was in already in the photography world.

That seemed to me

a big change, something different

from what I was used to see.

That s why I m referring to Sensation.

Yeah, but I m,

I was kind of,

I m thinking about kind of this idea

of sort of something based in philosophy

versus material reality.

And sort of the way that I have been trying

to sort of think around AI is

that I kind of also do see it

kind of in the way that like the internet has

been expressed, right?

Is a sort of like model of relationship to material.

It s like, because in an AI model you can kind of input

any number of any kind of training data.

It can be all historical data,

it can be all contemporary data.

You can kind of retrain a model going forward

and so I m kind of more interested

in kind of what the structure of a model is doing

rather than thinking about how it kind of reproduces

or reformulates something that kind of pre-exists.

But, which I also think is kind of an interesting dynamic.

I think it s important to have

a sort of relationship

between kind of material and intellectual

sort of relationships to each other.

So I don t know.

I am, I don t know.

I m very provoked by your kind of formulation of AI

and I m still processing it,

but yeah, I am,

I kind of think that there s something about the structure

of the models themselves and the technology

that is very kind of specific to what it is

that is kind of,

will kind of reverberate throughout from here.

And that kind of idea of like regurgitating culture,

I wonder if we re gonna kind of move through that

to a different kind of utility around AI

in the creative world at least, but I m not sure.

Ferdi, what is your and Gea,

what is your opinion on, I mean,

have you experimented with AI

and what is your opinion about AI?

And Gea, when did you first

discovered about it?

Encounter AI? Yeah.

I feel that probably one of us is an AI

project right now

and is thinking AI in this moment, I wish.

No, I think actually to be honest

I always had this idea,

and probably it s very unpopular,

but that everything that we release is,

especially in photography, becomes AI

after it s been released

cause in a way, you know,

you can change the story of it.

You can, you don t, you barely remember

what it is in a couple of years, in a couple,

like me today, I was just looking at my

childhood photos because it was,

I was in my mother, my parents house.

And I know, I thought, This isn t me.

This isn t like this background is manipulated

or this is like not real, you know?

I haven t been there, I haven t been with these people.

I don t know these people.

This is probably my lack of memory for sure.

I m also, you know,

I need a neurologist big time myself.

But I think, you know,

I have a very

let s say

contradictory relationship with AI

cause I really feel that everything that we release

in a way becomes AI somehow,

because it can be reread, rethought,

reimagined completely in a different way somehow.

Ferdi, you, I mean with everything you ve done

for a fashion,

you ve always approached fashion such a creative and new way

and you fought authorship.

So somehow I think it could be interesting,

your opinion on AI because.

Yeah, I mean for sanity,

I try to think of all these technologies that

you know, every year premier,

including AI as just an extension of the human brain

and just a tool that the brain has created

to create better.

So I try to avoid

the idea of a dualism between men and machine.

Otherwise, I think I feel intimidated

and I start to sort of indicate certain things

that maybe are not necessary.

So I like to think as AI is just the next step

of this evolution from the alphabet to the paintbrush,

to Photoshop, to the autofocus tool and all that.

On the other hand, having tried to use AI myself,

I ve realized that the one thing

that it s really impressive is,

which I think is still part of this evolution,

is the fact that the,

there is

like an unexpected,

unexpectedness in their, in the results.

There s a level of introspection that is needed.

[Alessia Glaviano] There is or there isn t?

There is,

that I didn t expect.

There s a level of introspection I feel that is needed

in a creative process with AI

because you are forced to really, really distill

your intention in order to fight against the generalization

that AI proposes you.

So I mean, Charlie would know much better than me,

but like the moment you try to create something

the way you imagine it,

you have to fight against this

generalizing force that always try

to flatten your intentions,

so you have to really understand what you want

and potentially push it to a degree

that it s almost unhealthy to get there.

And I m sure that in these days this has come out a lot

because people working with AI through prompts,

I m sure they go through this every day.

But for me, the interesting part

of the generative process with AI is

the introspective part of it.

It makes me feel very in touch with what I actually want

in an image with the references that I have,

with

the dark sides of my intentions.

So if you want to try to create an image

that you

sort of expect as being quite normal to create,

sometimes you might encounter that the generalizing brain

of AI makes it really hard for you to do so.

I dunno, Charlie, you probably do this all the time, right?

Yeah, well I personally am very interested

in that generalizing quality too.

And I feel like it s very revealing

and it shows a lot of like what expectations are

surrounding visual culture

and kind of also I feel like

especially in the creative industries

and in the fashion industry,

a lot of it is kind of buttressed

by a certain type of like luxury or exclusivity or elitism.

And this is a way to kind of break through that

and show kind of what s the sort of undergirding

that is a little bit more kind of related to

a general idea of whatever subject or input

you re putting in.

And I m very interested in the kind of leveling

through that and how all those different scales

kind of relate to each other.

So I actually really like that it s

often kind of like refuting my intentions.

[Ferdinando Verderi] Yeah. In this way,

not necessarily because it reveals my intentions

but it s sort of like reveals intention

as a sort of like general quality

in a way that I think is really interesting

just from my perspective as a creative person.

Yeah, so I don t know.

And I think we re kind of all sort of embattled

by cliché and convention anyway

and so it s nice to have a tool

that sort of like clarifies that in a way.

But I feel like in deep topics

that you ve probably discussed this week,

like photojournalism,

I think AI is a real ethical conversation

because it has to do with information.

I think in topic like art,

the idea of authorship has been already

you know, transcended the idea of craft

so many decades ago, like,

I don t know what s left in the art conversation

for AI to be shocking.

Is there anything you think that AI is standing to.

[Francesco Bonami] AI?

Yeah, yeah, to reveal?

No, I think AI will be shocking.

First of all, I wait for this technology

to be helpful to me.

You know, I don t get involved

until it really solve some practical problem in my life.

So when AI will be able to resolve those practical problem,

I will probably use it.

Have you tried ChatGPT at all?

Huh?

[Charlie Engman] Have you tried ChatGPT at all?

No I haven t yet because I,

it s too waste of time, too complicated,

and the result is not interesting to me.

I think the artificial intelligence will be

interesting when they become touchy.

So if you say something, will be very offended

and when you say something

it will respond with sense of humor.

And when you ask artificial intelligence,

Tell me a joke,

and they will tell you a joke that you never hear before.

So that s, I think we should start be worried about

if artificial intelligence start to have sense of humor,

that could be very problematic

because that s something serious.

[Charlie Engman] I think it s.

Is happening to artificial.

There is, there are chatbots

that approximate a sense of humor.

[Gea Politi] Yeah, they mimic sense of humor quite well.

Alexa is pretty funny sometimes

That they make jokes? Yeah.

Alexa sometimes is. Are they funny?

Yeah.

Alexa is sometimes, I tried.

You should try.

But I think shocking. I mean, I will try.

Someone else can try for me and I will view the results.

I don t. We ll record it for you.

I don t know if it s shocking

but it kind of was shocking when we

for the first time,

we have quite a lot of experiences, you know,

at the Serpentine in London and [indistinct].

At the Serpentine we have in our program

quite a lot of technology.

You know, we have a whole department of five curators now

who work with, you know,

new experiments in art and technology.

And so one of the first projects with our team

where AI kind of entered was Ian Cheng, right?

And I mean many of you will know the live simulations of Ian

and it was basically BOB, you know,

the piece which was shown in many places now,

Bag of Belief.

[Charlie Engman] So great.

Yeah, and it s a brilliant piece.

And that piece was born at the Serpentine

and then we had the opening, you know,

and then the next morning,

like I woke up because there were frantic phone calls

on my mobile phone from the parks, you know,

because basically the manager of the park said

that suddenly the gallery, you know, lit up

at 4:00 in the morning.

So BOB decided to not wake up at 10:00 AM

but you know, at 4:00 AM

and the show kind of, you know, started at night.

So that was, I mean I dunno if it s shocking,

but it was certainly, you know, confusing.

Then I would say, I mean in many different ways,

I mean the question if it s useful,

it s definitely sort of useful for me

as one additional element of research.

I mean, I use ChatGPT now just as one layer,

no, one of many layers.

It doesn t kind of replace any of my other layers.

It just adds, which has always been the way I work,

you know, new layers are added, no?

And it s layering,

but it s been mostly interesting

that it sort of seems to be useful

to some artists, you know?

[Francesco Bonami] For that, I agree.

And that s, it s for example, we, you know,

we worked with Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg on this garden, no?

And she said like many artists right now have

the feeling they don t want to, you know,

I mean there s a growing, I think, doubt

about event culture, no?

This idea that of short-termism because we,

it s not environmentally sustainable

so we need to think about longer duration formats.

And as part of that, you know,

a lot of artists at the moment are interested in doing,

you know, I mean Baruchello in Italy

did it a long time ago.

He started an agricultural, you know,

association and project.

So artists are interested in these long duration projects.

So they start rather an exhibition,

they would do gardens, right?

So Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg said

rather than do a show at the Serpentine,

she would like to build a garden in Kensington Gardens.

This is exciting.

And she wanted it to be not an anthropocentric garden,

but she actually wanted it to be a garden

which is there for the pollinators, no?

And so she wanted to basically only plant plants

which the pollinators would enjoy

so that all the pollinators of London, you know,

bees and many other pollinators would gather, you know,

in this garden.

And AI was an incredibly useful tool, you know?

The project could really not have happened without.

So I think that idea that it s somehow

you know, helpful for certain artists

to realize projects is,

so I m in many ways positive.

But I think also we need to be realistic

that there are lots of, you know,

dark corridors as Holly Herndon calls it

you know, involved and it drives them.

And we work at the moment

with these amazing composers and artists,

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst in Berlin.

And for those of you who wanna know more

about their practice,

there s a really interesting piece published last week.

[Charlie Engman] The New Yorker?

In The New Yorker,

which is a remarkable article, you know, about Holly

and also her collaboration with Mat

and sort of talks about these, you know,

problematic corridors of AI

but also about the potential.

And so I kind of wanted to find out more about it in,

and so I set up a meeting with, you know, Stuart Russell.

And Stuart Russell has been writing on it, AI,

since the early 80s

so he really knows the thing.

And he s also been doing it, you know,

through boom and bust moments

because there was a huge optimism in the 80s

that AI and then all of a sudden there was a doubt

and it sort of slowed down

and people thought it s never gonna work, you know?

And now we are getting in a sort of a boom moment.

So he s gone through, which is interesting, right?

It s this not for him, it s not the hype,

has been working for 40 years on this topic.

And he basically says

this really interesting thing

in relation to what Francesco said about, you know,

sci-fi, you know,

and of course another interesting example

in addition to the example you mentioned is

of course Frank Herbert, you know, who wrote Dune.

And Dune is of course famous also

because many people tried to do a movie.

I think now there is a new attempt,

which I think this time it s gonna work out.

It didn t work out in previous attempts.

And you know, the book from Frank Herbert,

Dune is from 1961 or 1962.

It s a novel.

And what is interesting is that he kind of added

an 11th Commandment, no?

There are the 10 Commandments

so he added an 11th Commandment.

And the 11th Commandment was in 1962,

you shalt not make a machine

in the likeness of a human mind,

which is obviously kind of, you know, quite relevant

in discussion to what s happening now.

So what Stuart Russell says,

and he has written a very interesting book, you know,

which you can find called

Human Compatible, which is kind of interesting

because we need to think also if we do AI,

if it s really human compatible.

I think that s a kind of an interesting premise.

And he s written for the new edition of this book

a sort of a postface, no?

Because the book is from many, many years ago

so he kind of keeps updating it.

And he there says a couple of really interesting things

about, you know, that we need kind of new commandments.

The systems should not replicate themselves

because if they do replicate themselves, you know,

we might be in trouble.

What is also important, you know, is

that we have a situation

where the system would output

accurate information, you know?

So that we don t replicate what s happened

with a lot of social media and so on he says,

where, you know, we just don t have accurate information.

He basically says we need an output

which brings accurate information.

And then the third point is also really important,

that it should not break into other computer systems, right?

So, you know, he basically starts a list

and I think that s kind of interesting.

Yeah, so Stuart Russell, Human Compatible

and

Holly Herndon s article in The New Yorker are

two things for those of you who wanna know more

about the AI, which I would recommend.

Thank you. Yeah, that article was

great, yeah. But you were saying now,

you were talking about up and down, you know,

AI being there, not being there,

but do you think now it s here to stay and it s just growing

or you think it is a bit,

how do you see AI in the future

of creativity and

art?

I mean, I don t know if anything will,

I mean it s hard I think in the evolution

to imagine of some technology that

you know, disappears.

I think I, you know,

the degrees to which is utilized might change dramatically,

but I feel like we should get used to it in a way.

But then I feel like everything new changes function,

changes the type of use we make of it

and it will transform through our use of it.

And I agree what Francesco was saying,

is like the moment it becomes useful,

that s when you really engage with something.

Until you play with it, you know,

it s one type of relevance.

The moment you actually use it and it changes your life

it s one type of,

it s a different type of relevance, so.

Yeah, yeah, I think it s definitely here to stay

and it s already being integrated

into a lot of aspects of our lives.

But one thing I wanted

to kind of bring into the conversation,

which is something that you kind of provoked in me

with talking about this idea of duration

and also this kind of idea of impersonation,

try, a machine kind of trying to be

in the likeness or whatever.

And I think it s important to,

and also how like duration relates to scale is that

you know, the way that AI exists now is

based on a large language model,

which means it s basically about scale.

It s this idea that more is more,

and if you just like learn more patterns and predictions,

the more accurate of an impersonation

you will be able to achieve.

Which is very different from, you know,

what specialists are talking

about artificial general intelligence,

which is something that would have to account for

a lot of things that humans also kind of deal with.

like space, emotion,

place, touch,

physical, the physicality,

a lot of different ways that intelligence interacts

with the body, for example.

And I think that the form of AI that we have right now is

a very specific form of intelligence

that has very clear limitations

and also dark corridors or whatever, but there.

[Alessia Glaviano] At the moment.

Yeah, but it s very specific I think.

And there is a limitation into the process

of using like vast quantities of data

versus using kind of qualitative qualities,

so things that are not about just

how much data are you putting in

but also what does the data mean?

How is the data kind of affecting society?

And I think it s important to make a distinction

between kind of what artificial intelligence is

as it is now,

and sort of the kind of boogeyman artificial intelligence

which is, you know, surpassing human

in a lot of different other registers.

And we re not, we re really far from that actually.

Like, technologically speaking,

the, what AI is now is really about synthesis.

It s about kind of collating a lot of data

and then processing it in a way that is

beyond human capacity,

which I think definitely has uses already,

especially in like outside of the creativity field,

there s a lot of things in like data

and statistics.

Well you know,

I m glad you re talking about this.

We had a panel yesterday evening with Paulo Benanti

who s a priest

but is an expert in AI

and Paolo Mieli, who s a psychoanalyst.

And we, because I was asking them

what makes us human, you know?

What is it that differentiates us from

and you know,

of course they were talking about the subconscious,

about the idea that we have a body

[Francesco Bonami] that we can feel pain. Soul.

No? The soul.

That s the thing. The soul is the,

but exactly and then you know, as a.

Can t replicate the soul, right?

As a challenge, as a challenge,

I said okay, but you know

if you think back when we were

saying what makes us human,

once we were talking about the brain,

we were talking about rational activities,

like we were able to do maths,

we re able to,

now that the machines are so much better than us,

we re going back to the emotions.

We are going back to the body,

we re going back to the touch.

So,

exactly.

It s an ever-evolving thing.

What made us human is boredom.

Is what? Boredom.

Boredom, yeah, boredom.

That s also another challenge for artificial intelligence.

Can artificial intelligence feel boring?

And also one thing. And be boring?

One thing that Paolo said.

[Francesco Bonami] It is already boring for me.

Paolo said. So that s a scary thing

because it s very human.

It makes me think about the boring,

is that Paolo said you should be worried

if the machine, when the machine is gonna answer you,

I don t know.

So, not knowing.

But that s also the famous prime minister of Italy was

always answering, I don t know, Giulio Andreotti.

And he was kind of an artificial intelligence guy

so

it s scary.

[Alessia Glaviano] But I think.

John Cage would made this question

to artificial intelligence,

Can it do good coffee?

And that s what would be his main concern.

And when artificial intelligence can do good coffee,

we should all be very worried also.

[Gea Politi] You know, I think.

Because it means that it start to

go in a deep level of understanding of human nature.

There was just an interview with Bill Gates

some days ago saying that in five years

we re gonna have personal assistants that are AI,

completely AI generated.

I don t know what that exactly means,

but of course it s not related to creativity,

is more relating to task, of course,

into making, generating tasks.

And I still don t know how they re gonna fix the idea,

you know, that the issues of privacy,

of many other things that, you know,

just by reading this, I was.

In how many years? Five.

I would be little involved

because I never had a personal assistant, so.

I know. And at 72, a little bit.

You can start with an artificial one.

I will need a, how you say [speaks foreign language]?

How you say in Italian?

Oh, caretaker.

[Gea Politi] Caretaker. Yeah, but I.

An AI caretaker. Which could be

[Francesco Bonami] artificial, I think. Yeah?

I wanna bring back the conversation.

I m sorry. To what we were.

Sorry, sorry. No.

I actually,

I wanted to say something about, you know,

the relationship.

So there are some,

I m not specifically into artists

who deal with artificial intelligence.

I must say it s not my main

let s say, interest or like.

I m not developing towards that direction.

But for example, I just saw this exhibition

at the House, the Kunst in Munich of WangShui,

and they told me how important,

like they basically, the art,

the artwork was completely made

with a collaboration, you know, with AI.

And they told me, Without AI,

I wouldn t see some corners of my mind

that I would ve, you know, I just couldn t explore.

So it was a constant conversation with this,

with several programs, with several AI

entities.

And actually the final

result was incredible,

was actually absolutely incredible.

And I see somehow where their minds go

and AI

starts or ends, you know?

It s, it was actually really, really impressive.

Yeah, I don t know.

I see, I can t help but kind of constantly see

the specter of labor in all these conversations.

This idea of like AI is sort of synthesizing

kind of labor and it s revealing that

like in contemporary life,

humans have been sort of reduced to their capacity for labor

and what labor means.

And sort of like,

it s helping me kind of reach corners of my mind

by kind of collapsing a certain amount of

sort of like intellectual or practical labor

that I can kind of execute with my body.

I don t know,

I don t have a fully articulated thought there,

but I do think that there s something about

this kind of like,

yeah, a sort of like collapsing of creativity,

of human experience, human relationship

to sort of like quantitative capacity

and like the ability to kind of achieve tasks,

which is something that I think is being kind of,

I think that s why there s a lot of antagonism around AI is

because there is this sort of like confrontation

with the specter of labor and how we ve kind of

[Alessia Glaviano] integrated it. Yeah,

well a lot of people. Yeah, as a sense of self.

Fear that they re,

no, but also fear that they re gonna lose their jobs,

which is. Right and that s a fear

because we identify with our labor,

we think that our job sort of equates to our value

as a person. Well, it s also

that because of capitalism,

it s like you either have a job or maybe you don t eat

and your family doesn t eat.

So that s also, you know,

we don t have a society that cares for the less fortunate.

It s true.

So that s also,

but we go into a completely different.

Yeah. Subject, which is

very interesting but maybe for another talk.

But I wanted to go back to what you were saying,

Ferdinando, about the intention.

You know, I keep hearing this voice,

you, Ferdinando, but the intention,

because there is the intention in an artist

which is very important, right?

I mean. Well I think

I ve only played with it

but I think that when you create something

or when you think about something

with the tools you ve been taught naturally

since you re born,

like the spontaneous thinking,

the thing that intercepted your thoughts, you know?

You re looking for, you always, or the paintbrush.

You are looking for something that kind of possesses you

a little bit from above in a way.

You don t, you re not incredibly conscious about everything,

every move in your process.

Otherwise, it s very predictable

and you allow for that space.

But, which is a way to introduce Francesco s poetry book.

But

when you are forced to deal with AI,

I think because everything has to go through,

through the articulation of a thought,

you are forced to really put things down

in words and intention.

And they have a result that is not often what you,

what you desire.

So you are forced even more

to basically analyze

your intention.

It just, it becomes for me,

the interesting part of it is the introspective mode

that it forces you to be in order to communicate

to a machine.

Everything else I feel like the, you know,

because we re not used to it yet.

So it s very self-conscious.

It also feels like more than the intention at the moment.

It still feels like more related, artificial intelligence,

at least to a human let s say

standard mind, probably like mine,

it feels more like about control

rather than, so that s why I see it much more developed

or I imagine it s more developed

in political issues

rather than creativity.

No, like let s say now we found out a couple of weeks ago

that artificial intelligence is used in the Israel war.

I don t, we still don t know how,

but you know, it s something very.

But would you say, Ferdinando.

Scary. That in 2023

we could say that creativity somehow is

the recombination of existing ideas into new forms, right?

Yeah, I mean I think AI, maybe I m naive

but like I don t see this,

I haven t experienced this as a massive revolution.

I experienced this as a step forward

in the interaction with the machines.

And I like to think of it as a form of memory in a way.

I, you know, from my superficial experience

connected to what Francesco said in the beginning,

I rather not imagine it as the future

but look at it as the present and see okay,

this is a way to look at the collective memory

that it s very practical

and has an intelligence that I,

we haven t experienced before in analyzing those datas.

But I think it s trying to do what the brain does,

which is collecting all the information you have

and presenting your solutions for it.

Yeah, exactly.

That s what interests me,

that is actually working the same way we do, so.

[Ferdinando Verderi] Because we made it.

[Gea Politi] Yeah. Yeah,

that s also the other important.

That s why we re the,

and we are the judge of it, no?

We re the only judges.

And no,

so I wanted to ask,

especially Francesco and Hans that, you know,

I mean isn t any artist every time he produces

somehow bringing what he knows,

what he has seen to the work that he does?

Yeah, I was thinking about an artist,

maybe you know, I m,

I have real Alzheimer, not artificial Alzheimer,

so I don t remember the name.

Kundala Thomas?

Kulendran Thomas. Kulendran Thomas,

a Tamil artist who does an amazing work using

artificial intelligence

and with video about the Tamil history and Tamil issues.

And when you see these, his installations videos,

it s very,

that I have to say was quite captivated

by the way he was using it.

Because you see,

an interview with Taylor Swift or Kim Kardashian

and what they re saying with their voice,

you d take a while to think that s not possible.

And because they are saying things.

[Alessia Glaviano] Like [indistinct].

About the subject and things,

but it s constructed in a way

that looks absolutely real.

And what s the name of the artist again, maybe?

[Francesco Bonami] He knows it better.

Kulendran Thomas,

Christopher Kulendran Thomas. Okay, thank you.

Christopher Kulendran Thomas, now I remember also.

The installation Francesco refers to

is a installation.

In [indistinct] in London, I think.

And I mean the use he does is quite amazing related

also to historical fact

and ethnic issues

and things like that.

So it was extremely interesting.

I found it very interesting,

the way he use it in changing thing,

in changing the presentation.

I mean it s very,

I don t know what you think of him, but I mean.

No, I agree.

It was a super interesting installation.

Anyway, think it s kind of what,

why also it s so great that you brought us together here,

you know, on this panel is

that we can sort of talk about certain case studies, no?

And also, I mean it s interesting that you mentioned

the show in Zurich and then Gea mentioned

the exhibition in Munich, which I also, you know, saw,

WangShui, which also was very fascinating.

I think in a way, I mean in any case

we can t really talk about the future of art.

I think that s always wrong because I mean,

the future, as [indistinct] says,

always flies in under the radar, no?

[Francesco Bonami] Absolutely, yeah.

So it could be very, you know, pretentious

that we would even think we could talk

about the future of art.

But what we can talk about is the extreme present, no?

And we can sort of make a cartography,

which is why it s great that we all can give

examples, you know?

And I think the examples you both gave are great.

I think one thing which is also interesting is

the kind of example of maybe more

kind of collaborative practices it leads to, you know,

that it kind of leads to new forms of collaboration

and it maybe also leads a little bit away

from the top down, you know?

Because I think in a way, particularly this idea

that almost artworks start to have

a self-organized element in it, you know,

which is something a lot of people have been thinking about

earlier on, also in relation to urbanism and architecture,

you know?

It s not the coincidence that, for example,

Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood looked

at cybernetics in the 60s, you know?

And of course cybernetics are, you know, is

an early sort of predecessor we can say

of a lot of thoughts related to AI.

And then through sort of cybernetics

they brought in self-organization, you know,

and so that means it s in a way, you know,

and in even in Kulendran Thomas show,

there were some paintings where actually he didn t really do

the paintings.

[Francesco Bonami] [indistinct].

The painting, that kind of,

also kind of, you know, passion.

That s why it is interesting because he was able

through artificial intelligence to produce

bad painting made by Tamil artist of the 60s.

I mean he was actually connected to abstract expression.

They were very bad, yeah, very bad.

The painting were very bad but there,

it was interesting that the process was very complicated

to do a bad painting.

And in a way, in a way.

That it was interesting that, yeah,

And in a way that leads also to then, you know,

more collaborative things,

kind of collaboration not only between an artist and AI

but sort of through almost like DAOs, you know,

sort of a decentralized form of our practice.

And that s of course leads us back again

to why Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst are

so interesting you know,

because they did this thing called Spawn

and Spawn uses, you know, live performances

and intimate singing groups to kind of collect voice data

and evolve a collective human machine voice.

You know, so it becomes a kind of a collective artwork.

And so from Spawn, you know, Holly+ was born

and then Holly+ is actually a kind of a living,

the artwork is a living organism.

And it s also a tool that gives access

to her and its digital voice.

And that means that a lot of people can actually make art,

you know, using Holly s voice, you know?

And new creations can be submitted to Holly+,

which is a decentralized autonomous organization

and uses basically collective decisions

about the authenticity of these new creations.

You know, so then Holly decides, you know,

about the status of this kind of work

and that creates also an economic model

where such creations can then, you know,

the revenue can be distributed between the creator.

So I think we should also not,

because there has been quite a lot of, you know,

simplified thoughts in relation

to this whole NFT discussion, you know?

But some of it was actually really interesting.

It was sort of a speculative bubble,

but some of it was actually really interesting.

And the interesting thing is

that there can be new distributions, you know,

new economic models,

new form of sharing also, you know?

And I think that s, you know, in AI,

and if you look at Holly Herndon s new project

with Mat called Spawning.AI,

so it s S-P-A-W-N-I-N-G.AI,

that s kind of an organization which really has

the mission to develop vital tools and strategies

that then can help artists to actually assert their agency.

So I think, you know, in a way

it s also the question to which extent

AI can maybe help artists, you know,

in terms of economy and also in terms of agency.

And I was thinking what is interesting is

that actually we have on the panel with Charlie

an artist who used, you know, AI.

And it s interesting because we met

in a very analog moment of your practice

because I was introduced to you by [indistinct]

through your photographic practice.

In the meanwhile, you ve done a lot

kind of with photography and AI,

and I would really love to know more.

Can you tell us?

What do you wanna know?

Just how you use AI within your photography practice

concretely, you know?

Yeah,

that s like a big, a big question, but yeah.

[Gea Politi] A secret? No, no, not at all.

I mean for me, I really came to it

as a sort of like lay person user.

And I was taking it from, in a very different way

than Holly and Mat were doing it,

where they re really like digging into the model

and creating their new models and sort of unraveling them

and kind of reconstituting them.

For me it s the model kind of arrived at my, in my phone.

I was gonna say my doorstep,

but my phone is my doorstep.

And it was something that I was very interested in

its popular use.

Like, I kind of got introduced to it in the same way

I think most people did,

which was like through Instagram,

people were putting really bad, kind of weird selfies

of themselves that were interpolated through AI.

And for me I thought like okay,

there s a really interesting sort of interpretive frame

that s happening here

and people are really excited about sort of

this impersonation device,

like giving up their,

giving up their agency

and giving up their representational qualities to machines,

which is kind of something that I feel like

we were already doing.

And I feel like with photography,

I think photography is a good analog for that

is where it is sort of,

there is a kind of like trading of agency

and kind of representational power.

And I saw that in my own work.

I saw that AI was just another interesting version of that,

especially with me,

the project that I ve done with my mom,

where I ve taken many thousands of pictures of my mom

and then that project had made me really confront

her relationship to me

and to the process of making art

and who was kind of responsible for what,

like representational modes.

I kind of saw like by introducing her into that technique,

by trying to train a model on her, for example,

it kind of let me kind of go into another layer

of this conversation around agency and representation

and yeah, what kind of visibility,

what visibility is kind of doing generally

and the kind of mechanics of visibility.

And so that s kind of how I ve been integrating it

into my work.

And would you say that it also adds a layer

of being a curator?

No, that is. Yeah, but I,

but yeah, but I do think.

The artist becomes the curator, no?

Yeah, but I kind of feel that

that that has always been

a layer of the process in artistic work is

this idea of selection and discarding and choice and.

[Alessia Glaviano] Yeah, you re right.

What kind of collaborators you bring in,

how you kind of arrange them in each other.

I don t know.

I mean, I think you guys are a little bit more apt

to speak about kind of what curatorial practice is

and what it means.

Well also, I think.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

[indistinct] No, well it s true.

because it s, that s when it.

Well, we need more and more curators

with all the things that are online.

We need, not art curators,

but all kind of curators, like news curators,

like photography curators,

cause there s so much out there who s gonna tell us

Like creator become like food delivery, you know?

That s why we did work.

What about AI as a curator?

Do you know of projects that are interesting

where AI curated? No, not,

maybe.

I mean but one could do,

I don t know if it has happened yet,

but yeah, Gea, you wanted to say something?

No, no, I know that there was an attempt to do a,

I forgot the museum.

It was actually in the US, it was in L.A.

Oh yeah, I think I heard about it.

Yeah, and it had to do something with the Kardashians.

So I actually. Always,

the Kardashians are everywhere.

I love that. So it s like curate a show

that is an art, a contemporary art show.

But the main topic or the curator should be

Kim Kardashian, something like that.

That was the main.

Hans Ulrich mentioned also NFT

and I would make a difference between NFT and AI.

Yeah.

NFT s like dandruff, totally useless, you know?

And you need to have a special shampoo to eliminate it.

And which I don t,

I think it s been invented.

AI is more like the fog.

It looks useless, but is both dangerous.

[Alessia Glaviano] It doesn t look useless.

What, the fog?

[Alessia Glaviano] No, the AI.

No, it is, it looks, could be useless

and, but it s both dangerous and romantic.

You know, it has this thing.

If you drive, it s very dangerous, you know?

I have a friend that say,

I know how to drive into the fog,

and then he died

clearly because nobody can drive into the fog,

you know, fast, you know?

And then,

but it s romantic

because you see the fog and you just sit down

and you see it from the window and you,

is mellow.

So AI can produce, is dangerous,

but also can produce emotion.

So I think it s much more,

and it is not much more interesting.

It is interesting.

NFT is totally not interesting.

It s like a hair, you know,

if you go,

you take a hair of Hans Ulrich Obrist

and my hair and we send them to dinner together.

That s the NFT, you know?

So, you know?

Plus I wouldn t do it in this situation there

because, I mean already. But no,

we don t have many hair, bald.

[Alessia Glaviano] Exactly.

But I m saying he is hair, you know, a hair of.

But then when AI comes in

and maybe can help with that,

with having more hair.

Well because you put two bodies next to the hair

that look like Hans Ulrich copies and you know, in,

so I think it s,

and I am interested in the fact that the future goes

under the radar because it is true,

it goes under the radar.

And there is a famous,

has nothing to do with AI

but probably the same person would dismiss the AI as he did,

is a famous, famous director of an Italian daily

that in the early 90s at the editorial board

in weekly board to do

he was preceding this board

and a person in, the journalist said,

You know, there is,

they re talking a lot about this thing called the web.

And this director said,

Oh, the web is like the [speaks foreign language].

You remember the [speaks foreign language]?

I don t know how to translate it.

[Ferdinando Verderi] Wallet, the wallet.

It s like a wallet but the men s wallet,

that this horrific thing.

It s a man s little bag

that they used to put the auto radio and the keys.

And the thing was,

and the guy said is,

The web is like the [speaks foreign language].

In two years, nobody will use it anymore.

That was in the early 90s, the web.

Then after it was still the director after many years,

because in Italy, director stay a long time

and another

board journalist say,

You know, this guy,

this governor is coming up in America

is called Barack Obama.

And people say that he could be

the next president of the United States.

The same director said, Shut up.

The America will never do an Afro-American

as a president of the United States.

So I m sure that he will ask about him, about AI.

It would be a,

if he say that it s interesting,

probably it s not interesting.

If he say it is not interesting,

maybe it s going to be really the future.

Can you tell us please

so we know, no?

If people talk too much about the future,

it means it s not the future, you know?

It s better to talk about the extreme present, no?

I think it s better to talk about the thing, you know?

So now we are talking a lot about AI

that make me think that maybe is

not going to be a future.

If something else is going under the radar that we don t.

I think it integrates our life.

I think, yeah, it s not, you know?

It s just part of it.

[Francesco Bonami] Maybe dandruff is.

But I actually,

I think the extreme present is like sort of characterized

by an obsession with the future, right?

It s like a,

it s like a, there s a disrepute

or there s like a rejection of the present

because the present is so uncomfortable

and like disappointing right now

that I think that is that like the radical present

or the extreme present is sort of characterized

by its escapist quality. The problem is

the present is always uncomfortable.

[Charlie Engman] Sure. When you need

to take a shit,

is the future after you take it that you,

not the moment that you need

to go to the bathroom, you know?

It s, that s the present is always uncomfortable

because it s the present.

It doesn t really exist, the present.

Yeah, but I also think there s a, well go ahead.

I was just thinking that, you know,

we spoke about the present, the extreme present,

the future,

but we didn t speak about the past.

And it s kind of interesting,

I mean the art historian Panofsky

and it s, I m quoting him freely here

because I don t think he really said it in that direct way,

but sort of.

You can say whatever you want.

Nobody go to check.

Freely quoting Panofsky, you know,

the future is invented with fragments from the past, no?

[Francesco Bonami] Absolutely.

And I think that s a really good quote.

And in a way, if you think about AI,

there is actually a really interesting kind of connection

you know, in terms of the past because of course

you know, AI is all about

I mean, it is about machine learning

but it s also about data sets, right?

And within the world of fashion,

within the world of music,

within the world of architecture,

the world of design, the world of, you know,

the world of photography,

the visual art world at large,

in all these worlds there are incredible data sets, no?

[Francesco Bonami] Yeah. And archives,

as a matter of fact, you know?

We spoke earlier tonight about Peter Bunnell

you know, the pioneer of, you know,

in terms of technology and museums, you know,

and his archive.

But there s so many, you know, archives out there.

And that s again, something Holly Herndon

and Mat Dryhurst are interested in.

If you think about, you know,

all these, many, many of these kind of data sets

and archives are not online, you know?

And maybe also some of them should not be online

because the artists might not want them online

and that s perfectly legitimate.

But you know, maybe some of these data sets

could actually all of a sudden be activated, you know?

So I do think that there is an interesting

kind of connection in terms of the past.

We should also talk about the past.

Well that this is what we were also saying before about,

you know, AI storing all this information.

So it s, again, it s the past that informs the present

and so the future, no?

I mean I see that as a line.

Before we give space to the questions,

we just have a few minutes

unless you wanted to add something.

I just wanted to add one little thing about.

Yes. I think a lot of artists

dealing with AI in their practices,

they question a lot the self, you know?

The new self also,

which is also something that probably we are

obsessed in relationship to AI.

Now what can a new perspective,

a new self, a new version of ourselves can,

we can become also, you know,

through producing anything from writing, from poetry

to anything creative through AI.

So I think that s one question that has been raised

a lot also between artists, especially [indistinct].

Yeah, well speaking of the extreme present and the self,

I really appreciated the book The Extreme Self

that was co-authored by Hans Ulrich here.

So I would encourage you guys to find this book,

The Extreme Self,

because I think it addresses

a lot of these questions as well.

Maybe the problem with AI is just its name.

It s just not very good.

Maybe it s just, you know,

sends us in this, you know,

one directional way of looking at it.

We should probably find the new name.

[Hans Ulrich Obrist] Oh, AI?

Yeah, I mean idea artificial.

That s such a. It s already.

That s such a great thing to say, right?

How would you name it?

You re not gonna tell us now, right?

But it s so true.

It s already old, AI.

I mean, there s probably 50,000 types of AI.

So maybe let s name it for what they are.

Like, I think when you general,

like we are guilty of the same things

we look down upon, which is generalizing.

You know, the computer does it to us and we do it to them.

And I feel like, I don t know,

it feels to me like the conversation of AI feels old

mostly because of its name and.

Which brings me to a super nice memory of Hans Ulrich.

Once we talked about the airport in Torino

and he told me, It shouldn t be named Caselle

because Caselle is such a name that no one can remember.

Maybe something like Alighiero Boetti

should be the right name for the airport.

But the naming, it s interesting.

I really love your idea, Ferdi,

that we should give it a new name.

And I agree with you, we should pursue that.

Because also, like I was in Munich

actually the day before yesterday

and then like, I had dinner with Alexander Kluge, no?

And Alexander Kluge is a great filmmaker.

He is a student of a Adorno.

He s 92 years old and he s very into AI.

And, but he said something really interesting.

I mean, he uses a lot of AI, you know,

for his films and for his image making basically.

For reproduction, isn t it?

Yeah, exactly, for reproduction.

And he said something really interesting

which is kind of connected a bit to what, you know,

you, Alessia, said,

but also Ferdi said which is kind of connected to this idea

that maybe the problem is not only

that it s a problematic name,

but it s also that it s in,

my biggest problem with it is that it s in singular

and not plural.

You know, because first of all, I think that we are many.

And secondly, I think also

that there are many, many intelligences, you know?

And there is,

and so Alexander Kluge said

there s not only the intelligence in the machine

and in the brain, you know,

there s the intelligence of our hand.

[Gea Politi] Of course.

There s the intelligence of the ear.

[Francesco Bonami] Yeah. There is also

the intelligence of the plants, no?

There is so many different intelligences.

He, at that dinner,

I had a long dinner with him.

We made it to,

I mean he far most, I contributed a little bit,

but he mostly made the list.

You know, we came to 77 intelligences.

[Gea Politi] Wow.

So I would agree with Ferdi and Alessia

that we need a neologism.

But in addition to that,

I want it to be plural and not singular.

Thank you.

Thank you all.

I wanna leave space for the questions

cause we are right on time.

So don t be shy.

And if you, if there are any questions?

Yeah, one to one is perfect.

Oh yes.

It s a hot mic.

Hi.

Hi. I just wanted to pick up

on something that you were saying, Charlie,

at the end of your talk,

when you were rushing through and saying scale,

which I would say, you know,

maybe it s called volume more than scale.

I think of scale as different.

But what do we do with this?

It s almost like fast fashion.

You know, what is the,

what s the implication of it?

Not only because of the volume that we re trying to control

and Alessia, you were saying we need more curation,

but we also, it s also carbon emissions.

It s just stuff in the world.

It is everything coming at us in a,

at a time when I think people are already overwhelmed.

So how do we control that or how do we

curate it?

Thank you for this question, Christiane,

cause I think it is so important to speak about this

cause no one actually brought that up in these days

and it s such an important thing, no?

Charlie and also Hans Ulrich,

if you have,

I know you are very invested with the environment,

so maybe you know about this.

I mean, I don t know.

It s a big question.

I mean, the question of scale is a question that has,

you know, scale is part of that question.

So it s something that I am really,

I think it s why I put it at the end

and why I was like, okay, lemme just rush through this is

because I think it is the,

it s the overwhelming quality

and I feel that, you know,

we re kind of come,

like the extreme presence I also feel is categorized

or characterized by this sort of confrontation

with a sort of preference for scale.

There s a sort of like obsession

with abundance and productivity,

which is always about like more and more useful

and more efficient.

And that there hasn t been as much conversation or space

for like misuse or disuse

or like laziness or

like pointlessness

or, you know, which we might characterize as leisure.

Like even leisure has been sort of created

as like a

category of labor.

Sorry, I m a broken record about labor.

But, so I don t know.

I think, yeah, scale.

What I think is, what s so provocative about AI too is

that it sort of tries to, it,

AI seems to have a sort of comprehension

or a relationship to scale that humans can t have.

You know, this sort of,

this idea of like hyper objects, right?

Things that are kind of beyond human comprehension.

I feel like there s a bit of a sense that AI can

understand hyper objects or like relates to them

in a way that it can make use of them

or sort of make them visible to me.

Like in my talk when I was trying to sort of visualize

the latent space of an artificial or intelligence model,

that s sort of,

I mean that kind of like dinky representation

of something that I necessarily can t understand as a human,

I feel like that is what AI is doing for scale for people.

So, yeah, I don t know, I mean.

I mean it s really a recycling exercise,

AI, in a way.

So maybe it s a good way for fashion to learn

to use scale to recycle.

Yeah, but I would say in my

unfortunately in my experience of it,

it s actually just ramped up the idea of scale.

Like the fact that I can make an image

you know, as an image maker,

as a person kind of laboring under

the kind of commission world in fashion,

you know, the fact that I can make 300 images in a day

just means that they expect me to make 300 more images

than I normally could.

And so it actually doesn t actually give me space or time

to sort of like combat scale

or sort of relate to scale in a different way.

It actually is just like a exponential,

it is, you know,

it s forcing me into a kind of exponential relationship

with my own time and energy and creativity.

So I don t know, I mean, I don t have a,

this is not a coherent answer

because I think it s something that

I m really still struggling with to try to figure out.

But the one thing that I can definitely under,

I have kind of a real kind of corporeal experience of is

that scale is one of the like central issues,

is like, what is enough?

When have we reached enough?

What does enough mean?

How do we define that?

And what is its relationship to how we apportion value,

not only creatively but also kind of socially,

economically, politically, et cetera?

And yeah, I think this question of enough,

which is this sort of like end of scale

or this sort of opposite antagonist to scale,

those two questions I think really define

the extreme present for me.

Yeah, I think, thank you for the question.

It s a really relevant question I think

and we, in the book we did with the co-authors,

Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland,

you ll find some also statistics and background

actually on this very question.

But I think one thing which I think is

maybe possible to add is, you know,

if you, we go back to this example

of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, you know,

working with AI on, you know,

the pollinator garden, you know,

and AI being very useful for that pollinator garden,

which has a very positive environmental impact, you know?

And that s then a question which leads us beyond art,

that really goes into, you know, environmentalism

and very concrete, you know, pragmatic issues.

Is kind of the question also

how actually maybe AI,

and there s a lot of literature about that right now,

can actually help us to address, you know,

the climate emergency,

how it can help to find solutions,

macro solutions and micro solutions.

So that s maybe an additional element, yeah.

Yeah, I think there s a question

of like incentive structures, right?

It s like what are we expecting the AI programs to do

and what are we asking them to do,

whether we are expecting it or not?

Like, what are the kind of values that we are coming

to the models with.

And also the engineers of the models,

what kind of incentive structures are they kind of embedding

in the model is something that I think is important

that if we kind of use the,

ask them and use them to do,

like make these micro solutions

or to prioritize care

or to prioritize specificity or whatever,

then, you know, they will help us kind of,

they can use scale in a beneficial way

because scale is like a neutral quantity, right?

It like scale is neutral

unless it s kind of,

unless it does something that s not neutral.

You know what I mean?

So yeah, I don t know.

I think there s a lot of potential there

and it s really how we,

what intentions we set to come back to your.

[Alessia Glaviano] Intention, yeah.

But in historical term I think

the ideal scale was

not defined

by any technological thing,

but unfortunately by

nature and viruses.

Because as two things

put a

defined scale in a dramatic way,

the pandemic of HIV in the 80s,

because that s was the first moment

when was a moment in the 80s when there was not enough.

Everything was sex,

everything was exploding and different thing.

And then the horrible thing of HIV happened

and gave a scale of what,

so that was enough, you know?

And then the pandemic with COVID

because then during COVID we realized

I think many of us realize how many pointless relationship

we had in life

and how many useless

lunches and coffee we had in life.

Because after, you know, I don t, many people.

[Alessia Glaviano] How many useless meeting.

I stopped seeing a lot of people after

because I realized why I have to see this person?

Because it was totally useless.

So I think that unfortunately the

death and thing define the scale

and not artificial intelligence,

is

the biology of the world that create

mysteriously some terrible things

that stop us from exploding

exponentially.

And we have to think without, you know,

COVID really redefined all the scale of things.

And the same thing, AIDS redefined

the scale of the relationship

and thing in a dramatic way and things like that.

And I think that s when AI will be able to produce

such an effect to make us understand what is enough,

you know?

What is enough in Instagram?

Who knows, you know?

Yeah, yeah, what is enough?

You know,

it s an interesting question.

What is enough in communication?

And now we are seeing, you know,

when something is enough,

it s very hard to define.

And I don t think artificial intelligence can have

an answer yet for this thing, you know?

It seems to me that we are setting the bar always higher

and higher and higher

and we think there isn t the higher point

and it does get higher and maybe [indistinct].

It is like the card castle.

You put the next card, the next card,

and then it, you know,

at one point the castle collapse.

And it s the thing I ll,

can I put another card?

[Alessia Glaviano] And then it collapse. Yeah.

And the thing, it start over again

and we ll see.

We ll see the next time when will be the thing.

Maybe the next

AI will be

is like a virus.

Maybe AI, we don t know it.

It s like COVID of AIDS.

We don t know it.

And at one point we will be forced to say

no, that s enough, and maybe we ll be too late.

Well I think the question of what is enough is

a conversation that we should be having.

Yeah. More panels on.

It s a great way to end.

Yeah. Yeah.

Have we had enough? Enough progress.

We ve had enough, yeah.

[Alessia Glaviano laughs]

Well we wanted to leave with hope,

not like what is enough,

but yeah. There s no hope.

I really need to go now. Okay.

[indistinct] . Of course.

Ciao, Hans, thank you. Ciao, Hans.

[audience applauds]

I see you soon, no?

So great that we could all be here though.

That was so nice and casual. That was beautiful.

You know, that a key needs to go is anyway.

It s enough, we ve had enough.

Anyway, I think it s enough.

If there aren t any other questions,

I d like to thanks our guest.

Thank you, Charlie. Thank you.

Gea, Ferdi. Thank you for having us.

[audience applauds]

Thank you so much.

And

I, before saying goodbye,

I would like to thank in front of you, Christiane Mack,

who is our Chief Content Operation Officer.

She came from New York

and I have to say none of this would happen without her,

so I would like to call you on stage

and maybe you can say, yeah, you can.