Alright, we can get started.
I'm a little out of it today, so apologies in advance.
We launched a second crypto show a few months back, hosted by Seth, Manu Pizz, and Jayman.
We decided that we were probably going to do an AI show, and Yousef has been working quite
diligently and quite extensively in the background over the last few months to get
everything in order and to line up the right guests and to get all the logistics in place.
So, we're excited to, as the Moby Media brand, to launch our third show.
This is going to be an AI-focused show, and Yousef is going to be the captain of the ship.
I'm just here to support in any way that I can, Moby team here to support in any way that
And we're looking forward to some of the conversations.
We think that AI and Web3 have an overlap, very obviously, and it'll be great to explore
some of the more, I guess, AI-specific conversations and see how those might intertwine with some
of the conversations we have around crypto.
But ultimately, I think that one of the things that AI has found more recently is product
And I think a lot of us are seeing it with these tools like GPT or Mid-Journey or Dolly
or any of the other AI tools, and I'm sure there's probably hundreds at this point,
that folks are actually using every day to optimize their workflow or to do things they
currently couldn't before.
I always say that you have all this untapped creativity in the world, and I think AI is
going to do a great job of allowing people to express that.
So I think crypto and maybe DeFi has found a product market fit.
But other than that, other sectors are still, in my opinion, struggling to do so.
So it'd be cool to see what the AI speakers and what the AI community has to say about
what's currently being built, what's available, what's being used, and all that good stuff.
But without further ado, I will pass it to Yousuf.
And again, this is his show.
If you have any questions or if you want to get on, just shoot him a DM directly, and
Thanks a lot, firstly, for the introduction and obviously the opportunity to host his
I think something you missed out there is we've been working together on and off for
the last year or so as well.
So we understand the quality that we bring, the network that we have, and obviously the
value from both sides as well.
So I thought I'd just make that clear there.
But like I said, thank you for the opportunity.
This will be a weekly show.
We do have our guests patiently waiting.
We're recording this on video as well.
So Vesta is patiently waiting.
So I won't take too long, but I'll give a brief intro to myself, I guess, for context.
So I've been working in Web3 for about three years now at senior leadership level in
marketing, BD and partnerships for projects directly for VCs.
I've worked with pretty much everyone across the ecosystem, from exchanges to launch
pads to VCs and investors to marketing agencies and everyone else that kind of falls
into the bracket of what a project generally needs to succeed.
I've seen very much a need for a more all-encompassing agency that doesn't just
focus on community, community, community, but also considers, I guess, more Web2
factors, such as proper branding, proper narrative and storytelling around around
We also do web development here at Brain Blocks, SEO and PPC.
We've got extensive media partnerships and relationships as well.
So pretty much trying to get things all in-house under one roof.
Because what I've tended to find is a lot is around hype marketing.
I think there's a place for that.
But there's not a holistic, all-encompassing kind of marketing offering there at the
So that's it from a Web3 perspective.
In terms of AI, I mean, I've been playing around with AI tools and embedding them
into the various organisations I've been working in for the last year and a half
now. And I just can see it's already a revolutionary piece of tech.
And it will continue to be and it's just going to have profound impacts across all
industries, similar to blockchain, crypto and Web3.
But enough about me, this is not about me, this is about Vesta, a well esteemed
guest. I've actually known for a couple of years through my Web3 journey.
This is the part where I don't want to get anything wrong because he does so much.
So I'm going to read the intro on this one.
And we're just going to a natural player conversation from there.
So Vesta is a multi-award within mixed media artists with over 15 years of
experience. He's amongst the first artists to start making crypto art and NFTs
since 2017. And there's a leading artist building Web3 Fine Art.
He's won numerous awards, NFT Artists of the Year from ARBC in 2023, as an example.
And many more, but I won't steal the line right there from Vesta when he does a
better job of introducing himself.
And he's had multiple shows and events, including museum events at the Museum of
So Vesta, I'm sure I've had some of that intro to pieces.
Whenever we speak, you're always doing so much.
And it's always a new story, a new project.
And everyone will hear soon in the spaces.
They're quite incredible projects you're working on.
So firstly, how do I do with an intro?
Fantastic job. Thank you, my friend.
And it's good to see you again.
It was a nice chat that we had before about what this whole thing is going to be.
And I hope it's going to be quite entertaining and somewhat informing on what is now
possible, because that's what I've really dedicated my life for.
But first and foremost, Yousuf, thank you for having me on.
Nice to meet you, Noah, as well.
And I just got reminded, I was listening to a Jordan Peterson podcast, and I was
reminded on how he just sort of reminded one other podcaster what a privilege it
is to be able to be a public speaker, no matter what it is that you do, that you
would actually have an audience.
And you've set up a whole bunch of new people for me to get acquainted with.
And I don't take these opportunities lightly, even though I have been given them
more often now, and it's great to be able to share these ideas, but it's every time
And I hope to keep it as fresh as possible so that people actually get something out
of it, because that's something never to be forgotten, that this is an opportunity.
Every time you get to speak to a bunch of people you haven't met and make new
friends. So I'm really grateful for that.
Thank you, Beto, and it's a pleasure on the flip side as well.
I mean, Beto's always ready to go as well.
I jumped on the call with him and we started speaking about what he's been up to
And he was like, no, no, no, no, save this for the podcast.
It's like light camera action straight away.
And I said, no, Beto, I just wanted to catch up with you to find out what's
going on. So Beto's always ready.
And without further ado, I guess, let's jump into it.
Peace, any gaps to get from from my intro and anything else you want to kind of
I mean, the story starts by me being a weird northern white boy up in Finland
in the early 80s when I was five years old.
And I turned my parents pots and pans into a drum kit.
And I was quite fond of African rhythm and Michael Jackson and James Brown
And so it's a bit of a strange mixture amidst like meters of snow to happen.
But there was something that was coming through me.
And rhythm has been a big part of life, I suppose, for me in many different ways.
And it led for me to form a couple of rock bands that didn't do spectacularly
well. I just wanted to be a rock star and make cool songs.
And my somewhat more conservative parents were able to convince me to become
a filmmaker instead, even though they tried to push me into business school
But it just I rebelled super hard against that.
And in film, I was as interested about the theory side as well as the making
side of it. And it all just came together.
And I went to film school in the UK.
I landed in Carlisle out of all places.
And I was expecting actually, ignorantly a cosmopolitan city.
And the first thing that I smelled when I came out of the train was cow shit.
So that was an experience.
It was quite up north in a small, small place.
But it got me a kickstart.
And from there, I went to Newcastle, graduated, had a production company,
did a bunch of documentaries, television series, music videos, all that kind of
stuff. But the aim was to go to Hollywood to be the next Ridley Scott.
Or, you know, I had just seen movies like The Seven and Fight Club and those
kinds of things that blew my mind.
And I would say that Fight Club probably plays a significant part in this because
that kind of introduced me to the idea of the zero credit and the monetary system
It's much, much later that that would come into fruition through seeing some
documentaries. But nevertheless, that kick that that's that was something that
definitely left an imprint.
But in 2008, by that time, I had a production company that was back in Helsinki
and I was making these television series about dogs.
And it was, don't get me wrong, I love dogs.
They're absolutely amazing creatures.
But that was not why I got into film to make these television series about them
You know, so I was like paying these production company bills and just like
this is awful. I I don't know what I'm doing.
And I have a burnout because of this series.
And I got this crazy idea that what if I started body painting on people?
And I asked the first crazy model who came to my home studio to be nude,
body painted and for me to photograph her and kind of assist her to go through
these mental processes as well to kind of craft what her life was about
and who she was with her values and things.
And I photographed the whole process and then I started painting
and photographing those paintings and I put it together with Photoshop.
And this is 15 years ago and I ended up with digital originals.
So I'm hesitant to say I'm a digital artist because I do use a lot of,
how would you say, organic material in the whole process of it.
But nevertheless, in the art world, they weren't super happy about
when I said that I don't have an original.
I just have these files out of which I make reproduction.
So they kind of just flippantly brushed me off and say, well, well,
you're just making copies.
And they didn't know what to do with me.
They didn't know what to do with the themes that I was kind of doing.
And they didn't know how to sell me and Finland for the best part.
It's amazing nature, great people, very innovative technology,
But it's not been the modern art mecca or contemporary art mecca,
so to speak, even though they're very, very talented artists here as well.
But I just didn't it was a weird thing.
So I ended up packing all my bags, go into London with my wife and dog
and do we just drove through Europe and then eventually a friend of mine
and I, we went for a coffee and he said that, oh, by the way,
I know that you're familiar with this monetary system part
and those kinds of things that I've been trying to look for
and artwork on my wall about my life now for four days.
And I haven't been able to find anything.
So I think you should check this out.
And then basically for this is about seven, eight days later,
I have art for crypto dot com and I have the first two artworks
and I started listening to Andreas Antonopoulos,
the bad crypto podcast guys and whatever.
And at that time, I wasn't aware of there being any other crypto artists in the world.
I was actually thinking that I invented the whole thing
because simply it wasn't wasn't really that online or whatever.
And of course, I was proven very fast and there were many.
I kind of jumped in there to say that, but you beat me to the punch.
And all of a sudden, I realized that there was a positive direction for money.
There was all of a sudden these three hundred digital originals are going to have a value.
This is going to lead to digital land ownership and metaverse stuff and all whatever.
So I was direct full in and because I'd made some fairly notorious
collaborations in the art world before and got some critical acclaim or whatever,
I was able to climb the ladder of, let's say, the crypto world quite fast
to get to know some very interesting people who commissioned me to do things
like Charles Hoskinson from Cardano, or I made a commission piece
directly for Charlie Lee for the Litecoin Foundation.
And he paid me in Bitcoin.
And, you know, it was just such a fascinating new vortex of a world.
But it's also been strange in that that it's crypto is, of course,
the main vehicle when you talk about that whole thing.
And the art side is a sideshow at best.
So there's not necessarily too many people who are intricately aware of the rules of
or rules is maybe not the right world, but let's say a lot of the substance of the art world.
So then it's a forever humbling process of tumbling forward with everything
that that you're going when you're venturing outside of your own bubble,
so to speak, but it's been an absolutely fascinating ride.
I mean, a lot there to take him for sure.
I guess I want to expand knowing a few of the projects you've worked on,
expand a bit on what you've done and who else you've interacted with.
So you spent a lot of time in Dubai as well, right?
And I think you commissioned a few pieces with the Dubai Blockchain Center,
if I'm if I'm not mistaken, and Dr.
So it'd be good to hear a bit more about that and how it connects
into some of the metaverse projects you've been working on and digital twins.
And then this is an show after all.
So then moving into your leap into using AI within the art space.
Sure. Well, I'll just preface the previous one a little bit of what
why potentially people were interested a little bit in that I
my body painted this Bollywood actress, and this is over 10 years ago now.
And we reached about 300 million people via legacy media alone when we did that.
But financially, it meant nothing because there were no NFTs
and we just missed so many different opportunities on that,
even though it was a gorgeous project.
But financially, to take two years out to make something very elaborate
and then have it go even further into the minus wasn't exactly like
But it did launch some some things which eventually now
landed me a collaboration with Brittany Kaiser,
infamous Cambridge Analytica whistleblower
who has the Netflix documentary The Great Hack.
And I think it's been watched something like a billion times by now.
So it's it's one of the most popular films on the whole of the platform.
And she's a fascinating character doing so many innovative things as well.
And she she doesn't like being described as a whistleblower anymore
that much because she's moved on fairly, fairly past that
to to become an entrepreneur and a data activist and many other things.
Of course, the film helps her.
But we recorded her live story as well as the relation
of data ownership into these high resolution virtual reality
and video and depth camera sessions out of which we're going to sculpt these
narratives that that help people in a fun way
and a kind of profound way, hopefully also to illustrate why data ownership
is important and how her story sort of relates to that.
And we just got funded from Mercatora Forum, which is which is in Egypt.
So Kareem kindly gave us now all the resources that we need to do some
reshoots, as well as do the post production on it, as well as educate
our own algorithm that essentially the idea is that it's going to be looking
at all of the things that I've done from body paintings to paintings
to nature photography and teaching the algorithm of the work that I've
digitized over the last 15 years in order for it to start to be able
to do the expression a little bit my way and then marry that together
with high end studio production sort of story narratives.
And then once we get done with that, which is we don't know when yet,
then we the intent is to go and take these artworks on a world tour,
as well as sell them on Christie's and Sotheby's and so forth
and make a little bit of a dent in that.
And as a part of this journey,
we've been with my wife in Dubai, like you said, for the last three years.
And my first connection there through crypto granny,
Marwan, and we had many different meetings and just this brain thing
firing up and thinking of what was going to be possible because in 2020,
when I started going there, NFTs were just about to be launched
and people were kind of excited about it and everything.
And and Dubai is not that much of an art culture,
but it is a peacocking culture and it's definitely a car culture.
So one of the one of the things that I kind of flippantly
said in one of my meetings that I did this concept car of a Tesla
already back in 2014 or something that could have become an art car.
And this is maybe two months after me coming back from the first visit to Dubai.
Dr. Marwan just says, hey, can you hop on a call?
And I'm like, yeah, of course.
And he says that, yeah, well, I've got 54 cars
and we're going to be turning them into art cars.
And I'm working on a license in order for us to be able to push them through RTA
so you can actually drive these full blown art cars and make them street legal.
So, OK, that sounds pretty cool.
That sounds very Dubai as well.
Don't go in with one straight to 54.
So I was quite interested around how this connects back into
blockchain, digital twins.
And then, of course, the AI subjects as well.
Well, sure. I mean, how it really connects is that for a long time now still
and I'll backpedal a little bit because I just went for a lunch
with a friend of mine who was a CEO of a coding company and working in Web 3.
And essentially I was asking him in lunch is that does it because he told me
that one of his coders costs about four hundred and fifty thousand euros a year.
And they have a bunch of them.
So I'm like, OK, that's quite interesting.
I thought that I was going to do a little bit of a dent in that.
Can you already replace your coders with some of the I said, no, not a single one
that if you're really building on on some of these things like they're doing
this innovative stuff that, you know, there's nothing you can yet do
with the code that is very useful to them.
And trust me, I've looked into it.
So this is a little bit the same with art,
that if you're doing some of the very, very high end of it,
there's no way you can just outsource this through some algorithm yet
so that if you're really going to be on the cutting edge of it,
if you're doing something super mediocre, then I suppose you
you really are quite threatened because in one way, if you just type something
into an algorithm that you want to see and you're not that fast
about how it was made and and not the artist's relationship
or something like that, then probably most people who want something
on their walls will now generate it themselves.
And then they feel a sense of ownership of it that they kind of made it.
So if you're a very mediocre and not great at marketing
and those kinds of things, then yeah, I'd say AI does make a dent.
But then that kind of leaps into whatever it is that you're building now,
let's say in the 360 world
and you want to build something in the metaverse
that is going to be able to really compete with gaming.
It's going to be able to compete with movies
and these binge watches of Netflix series or something like that.
You're going to have to be able to use AI in order to generate those worlds
in which you're going to be embedding people into these artistic expressions
and and doing all of these kinds of experiences for people.
So for the cutting edge, I think the future looks really great.
And how you're going to be utilizing AI because it's going to save so much time
and it's going to open up such vistas for for artists to explore.
But it's a long way now, the AI algorithm for it to produce art.
That is, let's say I have a friend here called Luca Delgado.
We work together. We're in the same space.
And he's just a master oil painter.
And he just has this mind that just produces
these gorgeous, large canvases that have such intricacies
and layers and personality to them that, you know,
AI is getting better all the time, but it's not competing even
It's not competing with art in any kind of way yet at all.
And actually, I kind of want to take this from a different context
from my perspective around, I guess, from a marketing standpoint.
She's myself and a few of the guys are brain blocks.
We've been trying to use AI to get things done consistently for a brand.
And I wouldn't say impossible, but it's extremely difficult
to actually mark your stamp on a piece of art or or or any content
for that matter as it stands.
So like you said, for the mediocre person,
I think it kind of blows them out of the water.
I think there's a place for it to where you can improve efficiencies
and you can improve some quality of output.
But for me, there's still certainly in its current state,
a human touch that's that's required as well.
I wanted to touch on something else you said around mediocre artists.
We actually when we announced this show, there was a comment which said
AI is destroying artists.
So what do you think of that statement?
And maybe from an artistic perspective, pick that apart a bit.
There's no extra context there.
So I'm interested if you hear that in the art world
and what your take is on that statement.
Well, it's such a large concept.
I mean, saying the word artist probably means as many things
to many people as God or, you know, whatever.
So it depends that I would say
being an artist of having a vision of something that you want to create
and whether you want to reflect something difficult back to society
that it's not facing, or let's say you want to have a serious thing.
Like, for example, you'll you'll take something like Michelangelo's
Pieta from the statue in Italy.
And what it's about is the woman's sacrifice
of knowing that your child that you're going to bring into this world
is going to be betrayed and disappointed and potentially in bittered
and whatever violence might happen.
And they're going to die, but still you choose to bring new life into this world.
So thematically, it's going into the very core of what it is to be a human being.
And then it's made out of this block of marble
where you just can't understand that someone is able to make out of a rock
It's impossible when you look at it and you're next to it
to comprehend that someone was able to do it from scale.
So it's it's this substance that this artist has seen
and being able to grasp with to do a masterful expression
into this very difficult surface for you to craft something onto
that remains there for centuries because it hits something very, very deep in you.
AI is going to be able to diffuse all of the information
from the Internet or whatever, and then probably start to do masterful stories
and all this kind of thing.
But but art is just as much about the process itself
for you to become someone who is making these things as it is the end result.
And I think those who are just concerned about the end result
as collectors and artists and maybe the money makers and whatever,
they are the ones who are most concerned, whereas those who I would categorize
to be in in the quote unquote real artists, whatever that means to anyone.
But it's I would say those who are compulsively doing this
because they have no other alternative and they feel like they have some value
to contribute to the world and they do all of the work
and dedicate their whole lives to doing something to bring it to the surface.
I think they're going to be fine, because ultimately,
if you look at what oil painting is, it's a technology.
It's just a very old technology.
We don't consider it to be technology, but technology it is.
And if you're going to be someone who is going to remain relevant,
because again, being an artist is a completely insane endeavor
for you to make a living out of it.
And again, going back into just being grateful to be able to speak to everyone
now here for them to pay attention to what the hell this crazy guy is saying.
That's amazing, you know, and I keep working at it as hard as I possibly can
in order to deserve that spot to potentially take someone's time
and even their investment.
But I did also realize that this is something that is becoming
way too stressful is going from painting to painting and living that way.
I'm 45 years old now and I've survived and sometimes thrived a little bit
and then just survived and whatever, but I'm still here as a full time artist.
But now we kind of realized what we want to do
and how to utilize these tools, what we're able to build,
for example, these sort of artistic villa expressions in Dubai
and expanding to Miami and those kinds of things to do a full company
and do a token and a full fundraising thing and build a whole team
that is going to implement a lot of this stuff in the real world,
as well as the digital world, the digital levels like you were saying.
So we're kind of, you know, even as an artist,
you don't have to be in the confinements of being just an artist.
You you're definitely an entrepreneur.
So you might as well learn all the things that are beneficial about that
in order to take full advantage of all of these opportunities
that are laid in our hands.
And that's technology, but it's a mentality
and it's definitely a vision of what you can do
that will improve somehow the lives of others.
I have a few things there from
that I just want to dig a bit deeper into.
So you mentioned oil painting.
Oil painting is just a technology.
Web 3 and crypto and NFT technology is just another technology.
Which is quite a profound technology
by comparison to maybe oil paints in that say,
and a lot more available to massive.
How does that compare to other technology you've used?
And what are some of the pros and cons there from that?
Well, I would say I'm about to learn through the Brittany Kaiser Project
of what just what is going to be possible
and how that's going to integrate some of the things
that are very, very handmade.
And I think that's where the interest for me is going to lie for a while,
even though I'm seeing how insanely fast these tools are developing.
I'm not snickering at them in the least.
But I'm also kind of balanced in the perspective of just how fast it is for,
like I said, for the cutting edge, so to speak.
So it's. How would I put it?
I had a thought and then it just dropped out of my head for now.
I'm sure it will come back in a minute.
No, no, no, for sure. For sure. For sure.
But I suppose you've touched on process, not just output.
So how have you been leveraging this kind of technology in process
and also to maybe find soon end results if if you're even using that?
Well, for now, outside of developing this algorithm thing,
let's say, for example, whenever it first started,
doing the body painting things, I also took some nude photographs
of some of the some of the models that I was working with.
And a couple of summers ago,
we were just at the countryside with my wife and I was a little bit bored
and just going through some of my old stuff and whatever.
And I saw some of these nude photographs and I was just that these are beautiful.
I mean, they were just like very sensual, but expressive
and kind of like not erotic in that sense at all.
They were just like some kind of elevation of beauty.
That was the that was the idea in these these sessions
and the kind of exploration of senses of being in the moment.
And then I just started painting and I thought,
what if I can do a new series out of this one?
And then I had this new series called The Senses
and we did a drop with crypto.com.
That was just bear market drop did OK, but nothing spectacular.
Whatever. But it put me in a role where I realized
that I'm now out of material for me to shoot to make more works.
So I I best find some new models.
And we just came back to Finland for a while, because obviously
this is not something that I would out of respect do in Dubai.
And here I started finding some new models to collaborate with
and shot some new new material, but then kind of evolved
to having a video camera present now and trying.
How would I bring these artworks to life recording these people
on video camera and then animating those paintings,
painting side of what I photograph and put them to come to life?
And could I use for the stills works, some A.I.
in order to let's say someone's
they feel like a close connection to a wolf or something like that.
Then with A.I. I could generate a wolf,
maybe even a wolf that runs or something like that, to utilize
the in conjunction with what I was doing this way
and generating something with A.I. and then layering it all together.
Now, it's not exactly happened yet.
I've used A.I. in a couple of experiments
and it's not yet been what I hoped it would be.
But I think it's very fast getting there that I will marry the kind of
stable diffusion stuff or something like that.
that is embedded in Photoshop, the generative A.I.
there, which is very helpful and just including it more and more
as a tool into the expression.
But it's all about merit.
It's I don't want to do it in a way that, OK, now I get to say to my people
that I've done this and because now the hype is on A.I.
and therefore take the money out.
I want to take it as in that when and truly it is useful,
then I'll incorporate it.
But there was another series that is quite different
because it sometimes does feel that I'm one of the only artists
who even remotely critiques the woke movement
or any of the culture wars in any kind of way.
Because of course, the art world is is quite enthralled by a lot of that stuff.
And I think many artists are super scared to touch any of those subjects
with even with no no or any nuance,
because a lot of the gates come crashing in very fast.
If you start to comment on that stuff and it's been driving me nuts
for quite some time of how free speech and artistic freedom
are exactly the same thing.
And if you're sort of having to dumb yourself down
from any of the nuanced arguments that are so polarizing right now,
then I don't think we have freedom of art at all.
So out of this annoyance and having listened to many different
culture wars figures from all sides and all perspectives,
I kind of thought that, well, if the original point of machines
were to liberate human beings to be more creative
and explore the universe and doing whatever, and that was the intent.
And now we're at this preface precipice of of let's say
people are still cleaning toilets, but they are starting to make the art.
I think we kind of messed up there along the way that
I get. And that's actually, well, an existential question of humanity
and a lot of people looking at AGI or artificial general intelligence,
which is a lot more sweeping than just a narrow generative AI
right now that we see is well, how do we automate the the nonsense
boring work that no one actually wants to do and actually maybe free up
more time to be more creative, like you said, as opposed to doing things
on the flip side, which doesn't seem to make any sense at all.
Yeah. And there's a lot to be said, probably.
And again, I'm not looking down on anyone cleaning a toilet.
It's probably would be great that if some of those people who consider
themselves to not have mental stability, if they were to humble themselves
to do something like that, even if it was in their own homes
and whatever, would probably increase a lot of value into their lives.
So and there's probably some people who who've landed that job
and are spectacularly happy because it's changed their lives.
So not looking down on it in this kind of way.
But you get what I mean, that it's not the greatest job that you can have.
And especially if AI is making the art.
So but so I got this idea that what if I made this series with AI purely
not using any any of my usual tools that it would be mid journey
that I start doing this series called the juxtaposers.
And essentially, I would start doing what I thought machines remained to do,
which was to breed some comedy and air and space
through this creativity into our culture war situation to laugh
and make fun of absolutely all the figures,
whether it's Klaus Schwab or Alex Jones or Andrew Tate or AOC
or whichever of these, it would be,
you know, porn stars to to whoever who is who is in these these kind of hot
topics and then start to mess with their image to the degree that,
for example, because I thought that who is Andrew Tate, really?
So, OK, so he's an anti-establishment guy.
He's sort of a high dopamine ride.
He's he's all these things and pimp sometimes then he goes like,
yeah, it's and it's and flows and whatever.
So I thought that so what would be a very anti-establishment,
but somewhat similar, but totally different?
And I envisioned him as an Amish apple picker in the field
because it's still the Amish are arguably even more anti-establishment
because they refuse just any of the these tools.
But any values, it's a very low dopamine ride as opposed to a high one.
Because I kind of started thinking about the culture wars as an axiom
that whatever all of a sudden you would say, see someone like
what's his face? Russell Brand.
He was a left wing sort of guy just a while ago.
And then he started going against some of the narratives of what were being pushed
from the, let's say, the establishment.
And then all of a sudden he becomes a right wing extremist.
And I thought that was hilarious.
So so then but what was missing from the left and right axiom
in the culture war kind of conversation for a long while
is whether someone is establishment or anti-establishment.
So I thought, OK, it's just very simple.
He's Russell Brand is a left wing anti-establishment guy,
whereas Ben Shapiro is a right wing establishment guy.
And you start to all of a sudden the map starts to make a lot more sense.
And it felt like there's more space into this.
So if I start messing with with the image of these people,
and make people think on what the values actually are
and who is being presented and why is it funny and how is it twisted,
then maybe that would allow all of us to look at some of that stuff
with a little bit of more glee and hopefully laugh a little bit more
because the potholes of division now in society altogether
are getting so fucking crazy that it's it's it's, you know,
I think there was a new measurement somewhere where
mental health in especially in the West has now driven over
all other major threats to humanity.
So, you know, the more comedians and the more free we are to a little bit laugh
at our some of our peril, which is to be taken seriously, I think the better.
So I think in in philosophy and aligning and how because I'm not that stoked yet
about all the expression that the A.I.
is going to be able to make, but at least it's in line
with what I think should be the perspective of what to do
with machines when they're doing creativity.
A phone call just came through and just completely interrupted.
Can you hear me? Yeah, yeah, totally.
OK, perfect. No, I mean, I caught everything there.
And I mean, definitely broke some deeper topics than I was expecting for sure.
But I mean, you're right in terms of the polarization
or at least seemingly the polarization that we see on mainstream media
And some of the characters you've mentioned are latching onto that
and making the most of it obviously to to build out their own brand as well.
So the juxtaposition project for you is just
a playful project to kind of point your finger at these types of characters
or situations and and laugh at them a bit, right?
Or have a bit of joy in some of the peril, like you said.
Well, for example, the other one that I really love that came together
was the I'm sure many are aware of the porn star, Riley Reed.
So, yeah, I imagined her as this very wholesome
Midwestern American YouTube cooking show host with her family
and her adorable four kids and a husband that they've they've
in this imaginary world of mind, they've they've made this cooking show
that is loved and adored by millions on on YouTube.
But she's still famous for her cream pies,
which is one of the features in the image.
So it's just I'm massively entertained by making some of these
as they sort of come along.
And I just hope that other people will be, too.
I mean, if you can't afford only fans, get on to AskKrypto.com
and check out some of these Riley Reed AI renditions.
I've not seen it yet, but I've seen some of what you should
what you've been through today.
They're interesting for sure.
I'll give you a smile if nothing else.
So I guess to a more serious topic around.
Content creation more widely, I guess, and touches
Really strike copyright issues and how is that any different
from what we do right now?
Me speaking as a layperson, I mean, if I need inspiration.
I check a bunch of nice brands.
I check a bunch of nice websites.
I like I take what I like.
I discard what I don't like.
And I produce my version of that surely to a degree with prompting.
That's what you're hoping to achieve or with AI.
Right. And I understand there are, I guess, issues where something
is completely stripped or taken from a particular artist,
let's say, or content creator.
But surely that is part of art.
We get an inspiration from all of these different experiences
and things that we see and then we create our own version.
So it'd be interesting to hear your take being so engrossed in that world
and maybe even some takes from people in this space around what they think.
Well, one of the early crypto artists, and I'm not going to mention
any names or whatever, but was clearly just biting his whole stuff
from this very famous artist called Jean-Michel Basquiat.
And anyone who knew anything about art
knew that he was just copy, paste, lifting the style
and everything to these expressions.
And many who didn't know better were paying quickly
quite large sums of money for this guy.
And he was, I think, living in Thailand or with Vietnam or something like that.
And all of a sudden making great money.
So I'm simultaneously happy that he's managed to hack the system
and make a good living as an artist all of a sudden in an unlikely place
using Web3 tools and then disturbed that he was kind of scamming people
that didn't know that that was so obviously a ripoff of what he was putting.
And many people were hailing him as this kind of like, oh,
this is such a cool original style type situation.
So this cops and robbers thing has always gone
either the most micro and macro, I suppose.
And it's it's a difficult one for so many reasons.
And I would say one of the things is that we have such huge problems
in the world right now that becoming very controlled, freakish
and very focused on something like
copyright issues and what you can generate and what you can't can't do
seems like too much minutia for me.
It's not that much of a problem.
I'm much more concerned about how do I actually manage to make a cultural
contribution significant enough to make some sort of a dent
and make a life for myself as well as carve some sort of a slice in history
for what it is that I'm doing.
And and I think in the pursuit of that, if I try to too much go
into the role of of a cop, I think I won't have the resources to do that properly.
It does seem to me that the tools are going so fast.
All the other very real threats to the world are increasing.
Seems exponentially sometimes.
And and I think the lawyers and the and the massive, I don't know,
whatever film production companies or image banks or whatever,
they will have their own tools and they'll play their games.
But they'll be playing catch up, I suppose, for a while, at least in
quite difficult situations.
But I'm sure as the tools of detection are going to become better and better
then all of a sudden, their their thing is going to consolidate pretty
But it's just not really something that I've paid too much attention to
because I don't have the capacity to to really follow it
nor that much of an interest, to be honest.
Sure. No, I mean, and so that's your opinion.
And it's nice because it allows people I get to use different
well, more creative license from inspiration elsewhere
and use some of these new technologies, which I'm personally a massive advocate of.
But how do you find, I guess, other
colleagues in the space or or folk in the space that you know
are reactants to this type of technology?
From a copyright perspective,
if it's a fucking conversation, it's been divided.
I mean, some some are pissed off and some couldn't care less.
I mean, there's some LGBT crypto artists like Rob Ness,
who would be encouraging you to buy his stuff and make new things
and recycle and put them for sale.
And then there would be others who get their, you know, panties in a bunch,
you know, in a really, really bad way, if anything is happening.
And it can be from a very tight knit group.
And I don't know or follow.
So many people that I would have a significant,
let's say, an overall opinion on it or on an observation
of where the conversation is at.
But I wouldn't say I think that those who are really doing the innovation stuff
and they're pushing the the boundaries somewhat
and they know they have something that is is going to be hard for AI
to catch up with very soon.
It's it's kind of like the same situation that I'm hoping that I will get people
it's really difficult to mimic what I do because it's so multilayered
and requires real life resources in order to do that stuff.
But I'm hoping there's going to be a lot of people who are going to come
and mimic it because it's the same situation as a Louis Vuitton bag.
If you don't have any copies out, are you even a luxury brand?
You know, it's and in some sense, those people are going to be able
they're going to push your thing to the forefront even more than when other
people see someone else mimicking what it whatever it is that you're doing.
It's it's a it's a compliment.
But of course, it's slightly different when it comes to AI, because then
It's definitely because it's outsourcing from everyone and
and working 24 seven with such power.
Who knows where AI is going to be with creativity in five years?
I mean, right now I use it for something like, hey, I can I'm making a Web
three company and I have these and these specs.
Can you make me a business plan template or something like that?
And it gives me a template in two seconds and wonderful.
I have a framework to then work with.
But could it write a vision that I have now and how to
holistically evolve the whole of the world of art in conjunction
with how that could potentially and I know this sounds a little grand, but
hopefully positively impact mental health as well as turn some
It won't be able to do that.
Sure, there's no way in hell.
I guess some practical diving a bit deeper, some practical insights,
I guess, from me or things to pay attention to for everyone listening.
New York Times versus OpenAI, probably the lawsuit to pay attention to.
They're talking about how OpenAI are obviously using a lot of their
content and as a result, the New York Times are losing things like ad revenue
because people don't actually have to go to their platform.
OpenAI hasn't necessarily denied.
Well, actually, they flat out said, yeah, of course we use your stuff.
How else do we get the data?
So that's an interesting one to watch.
And I guess from a commercial perspective, it's interesting if you're using
AI tools in your day to day life, but keep an eye on that for sure.
And another recent update from one of the tools you've mentioned, Vessar,
mid-journey, is they're now putting commercial liability onto the user.
So anyone using this stuff commercially,
pay attention to some of the things that are happening
just because I think it's best practice to do so.
But you're right in terms of process, which we touched on earlier, right?
I mean, I live in different AI tools, generally
chat GPT and generally text to image type
tools like mid-journey, stable diffusion or playground
which uses stable diffusion in the back end.
And it's it's actually just revolutionized
my speed efficiency and how I do things.
But I still make sure within all of my prompts,
I sequence it the right way to get results.
I don't just try to go for this one mega prompt.
I make sure that within even within the prompt, I'm always adding context.
I'm always adding my personal opinion.
I'm always adding something more, which is my DNA.
So it's not just the same as sometimes what I see now across my socials.
Take this one thousand prompt guide and you can do everything with it
and it's solve all of your life problems.
No, I don't think that's how you should be using it.
So just some interesting takes, I guess, from building on what you said
and maybe some practical advice or things to think about for people in the audience.
So this has been fascinating.
I think I could probably speak to you for the whole day
and dive into a ton of things here.
And like, certainly we're going to we're going to bring you back
to discuss more around the projects you're working on,
more around how you're finding things within the spaces.
As I developed and as obviously the art world develops
to embrace this type of technology.
But it'd be great to get a few lasting thoughts now, I suppose.
So what is, if you can pick one, your favorite AI tool or feature at the moment
that might be, I guess, more practical for the everyday user or people at mass.
You've mentioned a few like Mid-Journey, Stable Diffuser and others.
But if you could pick a favorite.
Well, I played around with Dolly and I haven't done now for a while.
I think from my day to day, what is the most practical
is the generative new tool inside of Photoshop.
That's been certainly useful and will increasingly become more relevant as we go.
Do you mind? Because I was kind of left with the tip of my tongue
on a comment of kind of librarians.
Please, no, no, no, I'm not trying to cut you off at all.
Jump into it, like I said, we can carry on.
I know you've always got energy in the tank for this type of stuff.
No, it's just because it's so delicious what you were saying about the
what the old AI New York Times, because it's like we've increasingly seen
how the payment model, I mean, first it was in MP3s came and killed
a bunch of geniuses out of the music industry and they went elsewhere
and we've seen what happened to music in conjunction with
like some of the masters of where we're now.
And similarly, we've seen the press.
It's sort of got its own engine and fact checking machines
and real journalists to the point of becoming this sort of clickbaity more,
you know, kind of a different thing of how the New York Times of today
is not the New York Times we had, let's say 20 years ago.
Some people haven't realized the difference.
And I think that's scary in and of itself.
I had this conversation with a friend of mine just a while ago
because he was saying that he's very afraid of of this chip thing
kind of being embedded into our brains and us kind of getting
the augmented reality and virtual reality capacities directly as an interface.
And I was kind of just saying that, yeah, I resonate with that.
I'm not going to be one of the first ones to kind of put a chip behind my ear
and and all of the concerns that he has about it are legit.
But if you really think on it, it does feel like the chip was already installed
in the form of software into us some time ago.
And it didn't require anything that is hardware.
It was more of a software approach that now manifests in different kinds of ways
in in whatever mental health crisis, as well as Elon Musk
calls the woke mind virus or many other other conflict things of what we have.
Yeah, yeah. And and just this kind of where is the border line between the
the internal and the external?
Because for certainly when I first saw the work of Salvador Dali as a kid,
all of a sudden there was a new world inside of my mind that I had seen
in my dreams, but I wasn't aware of at all.
And I would say that Salvador Dali's works were the first embedded
bedment of myself into a metaverse, because we already have
many of these shared things that are quite strange, like our dream worlds
and other things that we we visit in different ways.
But there's familiarity and all that kind of stuff.
And and we're now quickly evolving into that.
Some of the relevance of our internal and external space is is increasingly
dissolving and we get to share these experiences between us.
And I would just say in the honor of the theme of the of the show
that we will be requiring AI tools to hopefully in some personified way
to mitigate the the media consumption that we're going to do.
It's going to help us to build some things that we want to do
and not necessarily take all the time to learn all of these very complicated
tools like now building a metaverse gallery for yourself or whatever it is.
And it'll just keep rolling from there.
And if if you're just a very fearful person in general and you're just worried,
then you can find yourself in a loop that is this very protective cycle.
And this is very personified by the culture wars in many different kinds of ways.
And and if you're just approaching all of this stuff through neurosis and fear,
then you're not going to be able to utilize any of the tools in a beneficial
way because it's it's going to expand some nightmarish scenarios.
But it will also bring up some utopian elements in order to kind of maintain
some of that balance and as individuals, if we focus more on some of the solutions,
I think at least we can influence our own paths to become a little bit better
and for us to maintain relevance in whatever it is that we're we're doing
But there's still going to be a lot of people on the planet
and we're going to need each other.
And I don't think most of us are going to want to have,
you know, sex dolls and sort of AI girlfriends or boyfriends or whatever.
So it's there's plenty of opportunity.
We're going to need that one for another show for sure.
That's a weird, quirky world.
I mean, we might need to get a few other requests for that one for sure.
But I had a few more questions, but I don't want to.
I don't want to take away from the positive sentiment you ended on there.
But what I do want to do is know if there's anyone in the kind of wants
to ask best or any questions or of course, myself and then then fire away.
whilst you check through comments and and check through X or Twitter
or whatever Elon Musk wants to call it these days.
I'm not going to let you escape this problem from the one tool
you would recommend, Quickfire.
What would you what would you say is your the tool of choice
or something that maybe beginners or people in the space can get to grips
with to get more involved in the art world?
I know it's very broad in terms of what that means, but what tool would you say?
Well, both actually both.
I mean, fire on anything else you can any other chance you can drop.
So creatively, one thing that is is quite fascinating is mid journey.
I think it's it's really upping the ante all the time.
I'm sure there's many other better ones and even free ones
and something that I'm just not aware of.
And I'd love if people sent me all the stuff that what they've done
experiments on for me to become more aware of some of that stuff.
What I would hope for people to have
is is tools for critical evaluation
of the information of what we're consuming.
Like, I think on on X, one thing that is brilliant is the community notes.
And I do love how Elon Musk is holding himself accountable to those community
notes just as much as he's holding all the other ones accountable.
So all of those kinds of innovations in AI for us to be able to
diffuse from this world of facts and world of lies more and more.
I'd love to be more aware of what is available for me to use now,
but also encourage people who are within this field to develop those things
and fast, because I think there's this massive opportunity.
But I wouldn't even know what they are.
But from an artistic, more selfish point of view,
I suppose mid journey is something to look into if you haven't checked out
these things at all. It is a beautiful algorithm and developing very fast.
That wasn't rapid fire, was it?
I just can't shut up, can I?
I've known you long enough that I was not expecting rapid fire.
I did it on a webinar prayer, but it's good to get context nonetheless.
I mean, that's why that's why you'd be a great, great guest with this show.
Any last pose of wisdom for aspiring
digital art collectors out there?
And this is your chance as well to unashamedly throw in any projects
you're working on and anything else you're up to at the moment
that you want people to check out?
Yeah, that's a that's something that I actually thought about for a while.
And I'm not sure if I if I landed on anything quite sensible.
But if you're looking to becoming an art collector,
it's just one of those things that there is no shortcuts.
I mean, it's the same as if you're becoming a crypto investor.
If you're becoming anything, it's like the opportunities to invest
into artists now who are doing the cutting edge and the avant-garde of our time.
There are some spectacular people doing things whose works are going to be very,
very valued and it's they're not necessarily conservative choices.
It's something that if you do find someone who has the substance
and something like that, that they're doing something interesting
and you dwell deeper into them, then there's a resonance
that is beyond your investment portfolio
into something that enriches your life to a degree
that you will find absolutely mind blowing.
Because at best, if you if you get a relationship with an artist
and you buy some of their one of their works
and it's assuming it's it's something that really speaks to you
and you put it on your wall physically, especially,
then that means that you're kind of it's it's almost like entering a relationship.
And and then all of a sudden you start to feel your whole space
and your life enriched in a way that you didn't think that that was a thing.
So one of the things that galleries often do is that they borrow a painting
for you for a month and then because they know that if you've had it
for a month, you then realize what that thing is.
And that's why you don't want to let go of it.
And then that's how they make their cells.
But in similar ways, you can just do deep dives as you as you do into,
I don't know, a Netflix series.
If there's enough of a rabbit hole in that person for you to discover new things,
go about it that way and not necessarily in a way
that you'll get your money back in a few months,
because that's bastardizing the whole of the NFT space
or did already and kind of nearly ruined it.
But that's one thing and words of advice.
Otherwise, just buy my art, artforcrypto.com.
Sorry, I laughed over that. It's artforcrypto.com, right?
And another site is artevo.org.
So that's A-R-T-E-V-O dot org.
That's all the body painting and abstract stuff.
And on Twitter and X, you'll find me at artbyvesa.
Well, I suppose here in spaces, you'll see me as a speaker there anyway,
if you're interested to know more of my crazy things.
For sure. No, I appreciate that.
I do have one question that's just come in to me now.
Have you tried motion tools such as PCollapse or Runway
to add any movement to your images or your artwork?
No, not yet. I haven't. I heard of Runway.
And I think I even opened it on a web tab.
But for some reason, I don't know what happened.
Maybe I just got busy and forgot it or something like that.
But thank you for the reminder, because I'll most definitely check it out again.
They are, I mean, I've played around with those tools a bit.
No one's letting me know.
There are a couple of hands as well.
So if we can get them into the
into the spaces here, then that would be great.
See, Captain Levy has his hand up.
Yes, by the way, in the meanwhile, I'm seeing that there's so many people here
and they they stuck with us all the way to the end.
I'm very happy that you were here.
And I'm really hoping that there was a contribution on some level.
But, yeah, super grateful that so many joined.
From a selfish perspective, great for me.
So I'm sure you've added value to everyone else.
And same sentiment shares, same sentiment shares.
So we have Captain, Captain Levi, is it in?
Yes, Captain Levi, Yusuf, Vesa.
I have to check your profiles.
OK, I think the first thing I should say, Vesa, is yes, I saw one of your tweets.
And I did use the force, and I think I moved an object, but it wasn't really waiting.
So the thing is, you have both of you have really interesting profiles,
contrasting profiles, I must say.
And one of the major and beautiful aspects of art is the contrast itself,
how each contrasts and despite the fact that they are contrasting
and they somehow support each other.
I've been really interested in the tech space ever since I was Iron Man in 2008.
And it's funny how a lot of things have changed and evolved,
and evolved so quickly at that.
The newest techs right now, AI generative techs,
thinking about new jobs like prompt engineering,
where the engineers, the art is just as good as the prompt,
and the prompt is as good as the vision of whoever is making that art.
I honestly appreciate all forms of art,
be it visual or audio or whatever form of art that there is,
even art in a building code, the arts and technology itself.
It's quite interesting because it brings about this new generation,
a new generation of users, the new generation of basically everything.
I don't know, Jack, about building a logo,
but right now, if I wanted to build a logo,
it will never be as good as what depends on the perspective of the person.
It may never be as good as what an experienced logo maker
who has seen the evolution of digital technologies will build,
but then he will be able to, based on the experience that he has,
he's going to definitely be able to do something better than I ever would do.
Speaking of generative art...
If I might just interject two seconds,
my logo took me 25 years as an adult creative to arrive at
to the form of where it's now that I'm actually happy with it,
and it took all of this journey, all of these crazy squiggles
and tragedies and celebrations and all of these things
for me to grow to be the person to realize that this is who I am as a logo,
and this is what I wanted to represent,
and now I see it clearly, but it took that 25 years even as an adult
to clarify internally for me what that representation was.
So if you haven't done the journey, let's say in a similar way,
I now see that people are using their AI to do their dating pictures
on Tinder or whatever, and it makes you have a slightly better jawline
and more exciting background and better posture
and more dress sense and this kind of a thing.
And if you skip the whole journey of you looking like a fool trying new clothes
or going to the gym or then actually living in Dubai
as opposed to having Dubai as your background,
if you then go on a date with that profile picture
and let's say the lady is thinking that that's who's going to be arriving there
and then you're slumped and shittily dressed and whatever,
then that's not going to go anywhere.
This is what I mean in the art as well, that the process matters
and it matters to us why we matter as human beings.
Why is it important for us to be here to begin with?
We struggle and strive and go through trials and tribulations
in order to arrive at something and then we become people of value.
And if you just try to shortcut all of that stuff
and then you have a super fancy logo,
but that logo actually doesn't really point to who you are
or of that substance that you're able to deliver,
then you're just wasting a bunch of time.
And I think this is a little bit the quick fix mentality
that I'm averse to, that people are using with AI
thinking that you're there and you're not.
I totally agree. In fact, sorry, you should go ahead.
No, I was just going to say an interesting point you made
which is going down a slightly different tangent to VESA, I suppose,
but it's for me, AI democratizes creativity a lot more.
And what I mean by that is sometimes the tools are the blocker
for me to be able to do something.
And what I mean by that is I've managed marketing teams
of up to 20 people and that's been everything
from content writers or copywriters to graphic designers
to video editors and everyone in between.
And sometimes it's just the case of them executing
on what's in my mind, but I'm just not as familiar
with the Adobe suite, let's say, as they might be.
So I do think there's another tangent to this,
which is actually it allows me personally
to actually be a hell of a lot more creative
because I'm just dumping my ideas, my DNA,
my experiences, what I think, what my beliefs are
into these prompts to shape what's already in my mind.
But I could never, for example, VESA,
I can barely draw a stick, man, I'll be honest with you.
So to create any of the types of works you've created
is impossible for me, but I certainly know in my mind
what I want the output to be.
And I think tools like this allow you to democratize,
I suppose, some of that process and creativity goes up
and execution is done by the machines,
I guess, like you've said.
So that's my, I guess that's my take,
which is building in what you said around experience,
but using the AI technology to be able to actually achieve it.
Levi, please, you had something else to say, I think.
Yeah, my apologies for cutting.
Oh, no, no, no, no, please feel free to cut me off any time
because I want to throw another aspect regarding this.
If I wanted to learn to be an artist now,
if I really knew the value of art itself,
I'm going to go to a professional artist
to teach me how to use my hand to express myself first
before learning how to prompt into stuff.
If I happen to say, I happen to learn something new,
it's definitely going to take time.
In fact, that journey of learning that new thing,
I see it as an art because it brings a lot of room
for improvement on different aspects and different categories.
Let's take, for example, now, the lines,
I already said something like programming was an art.
There's a way that I write code,
some super 10x developer will see my code
and probably laugh at me because of what I wrote.
The problem that I used to use about 10 lines of code
to solve used about two lines.
That in itself is based on that experience that he has attained.
Similarly, if Vesa should give a prompt to enemy journey AI
he's definitely going to know, okay,
I think we should add a bit of a proper context here.
I think we should add a bit of a proper context here
and it gives something that's a little bit closer
to what he thinks might actually be what he had in mind.
The next thing is, I should see that prompt now.
I may not be able to understand
why he decided to deliberately put that prompt,
but I may end up appreciating the end result
of whatever image or art comes out of that prompt.
Bottom line is, I do not have that experience he does,
but I see ended up appreciating the end points
because I think I may have seen what he was,
the events he was trying to, the instance
he was trying to actually point out.
I think I'll stop monologuing here for now.
Sure, but if I may just roll forward with that a little bit
because one thing that is important,
and let's say many people who go to art school
and it's become this sort of industry
which was never really meant to be
in the sense that it became,
because when you're going to school
and you don't necessarily have yet your personality
very developed and you might be just not lived,
you don't have experiences,
what is the purpose of art to begin with?
It's something to connect and communicate
and going all the way to the very beginning of art,
it would be probably cave painting
and body painting would be the first expressions
when we were climbing out of the primordial sludge
as humanity and we took maybe some strange mushrooms
and tried to figure out our relationship to it
and said, hey, well, this is how you hunt buffalo,
whatever, what you were trying to leave a mark with.
And then it became in art school,
all of a sudden this kind of thing
where it's footnotes on footnotes on footnotes,
And it's almost like this scholarly study
given to people who don't yet know
what they have to say because they haven't lived
and it's not a personally lived experience
in relation also to learning
who the grand masters of all time have been
in order for you to find a position there.
May I interrupt for a moment here?
I'd be more concerned as a beginning artist
to discover who I am and go live life somewhere
to discover what it's all about
in order for me to have something of substance
to deserve the spot for people to pay attention
to what it is that I'm saying
no matter what the medium.
Whether you use oil paints or AI or statues
or I don't know, expressive dance,
it would be great that you were saying something
worthy of other people taking note
that they give their valuable time to you.
And that's what I would be primarily concerned about
How will I become a person of substance
deserving of other people's time?
Those are wonderful comments, Visa.
I'm new to this space and I apologize.
I'm not quite familiar with the protocols
I just want to thank you all for being here.
Mobimedia, Youssef and Visa.
The information that I have gleaned today is fabulous.
And I'm questioning because I'm a text creator
and I don't know how to ask about artistry
because three of my projects had wonderful
well-known artists on them.
And one of the projects went as far as Michael Bay
in terms of a script for a woman pirate.
And he said it was too expensive.
Now, I live here in Alberta.
We have some of the best AI developing in the world
And I'd like some guidance on how to access
some of these artists and the technology.
And you are so well versed here.
Thank you for the comment, Elo.
Now, I did see Michael Bay say something about
AI not being able to touch, quote-unquote, real artists,
whatever that means for anyone.
A while ago, he was in an article or something like that.
And I do actually resonate with what he says.
I'm not sure if he was quoted a little bit too bluntly
in the article to what he was saying.
I'm sure there was more sophistication to it a little bit.
But it does feel like that.
That if you want to work with real artistic substance,
it's still too much of a disco jumble ball show,
the whole thing, trying to do things with AI.
So at least to me, what feels significant,
like, let's say, a movie like Fight Club
or something like that, that is very much on the cultural pulse
at the time, bringing something to the surface
that was not nearly visible to anyone
and then kind of hitting that cultural zeitgeist
that's what the job of an artist is,
is to bring something that is not visible to most
but within us all to the surface so that we can all look at it
So to know, if your question was,
and my apologies if I got it wrong,
if your question is how to get to know the AI artists
who are now doing purely with AI,
it's not really my field.
I wouldn't know who they are.
I'm sure they're fantastic people just really progressing
But I'm lacking of knowledge to kind of recommend them
because it's not been in my sphere yet that much.
Thank you for that answer.
And Basa, you mentioned that whole sort of perception
that we get, and powerful art changes our perceptions.
And powerful art, bravo to you for bringing together
the creative, the art, but also the technology part of it
because that is what true art is.
It somehow anticipates what that ethos is that zeitgeist.
Thank you so much, Elena.
Thank you for your comment.
We do have, I think we have Saad Satel
who's been patiently waiting.
Nice to see Irina here as well in the listeners.
Hi, Irina, how are you doing?
Yeah, thanks for having me up.
I was in a space yesterday and I apologize.
I didn't want to seem like I wasn't here.
I was mid-bite on a breakfast sandwich.
We don't want you starving on that one.
No starving artists here, not in this age.
I guess I'm trying to figure out, I was in a space yesterday
with some really brilliant people talking about AI art
and I'm jumping in these spaces as often as I can now
because I'm excited to see what I would describe
as sort of maybe a resurgence or at least an opening of my eyes
to the staying power of these tools
to help people be expressive and to be artistic.
Yeah, I mean, I think this microphone has a little bit of feedback
I think we can understand you pretty well.
Yeah, it's fine. It's fine.
I guess I speak in a way that allows for permits for that
But the point I guess I'm trying to say is that
the question I raised yesterday was what is art,
who is an artist, and who gets to decide?
And I guess for those who are listening,
who are maybe just starting to explore AI art for the first time,
I guess my message to you is to not be discouraged
by people who are trying to criticize the tools
and those who want to ascribe the term artist to themselves
because those people, genuinely, they don't know anything.
They truly do not know anything about the history of technology
I'm not an expert, but I do know quite a bit about art history
and, in particular, this period of time with AI technology
reminds me of when photography came onto the scene.
Nineteenth century is like coming on the heels of impressionism,
post-impressionism, early modernism,
and the heat was there for photography.
Photographers were hated, not by everybody,
but there were people who were very derisive
and disrespectful and dismissive of it.
This is any number of insults and sort of things.
And look at what photography has become in this world
and what it morphed into with cinematography and filmmaking
and all sorts of artistic, wonderful things.
And so, you know, I'll just start where I started.
Who is an artist and who gets to decide?
Certainly not for the critics.
They don't get to decide that.
They hardly ever know anything at any age that they're in.
You know, they make it interesting.
They make it controversial.
But there are more people making images
and expressing themselves and making creative work
than ever before in the history of the world.
The volume of terabytes of data
that are reflecting people's visions and dreams,
aspirations, their professional work, their therapeutic work.
A lot of this output is just personal.
Not everybody's trying to sell stuff.
And not everybody's trying to become Rembrandt or Degas
or any, you know, they're just looking to express themselves.
And so there's a beautiful and a wholesomeness about this.
And I just want to say thank you for hosting these spaces
and making room for people to share
and to understand that this is not...
No one's coming for artists.
And in fact, I'll just conclude by saying
I think the art that is made purely
in the sort of old traditional standards of oil, acrylic,
watercolor, clay, you know, sculpture, whatever,
And of course there's tools.
I don't know what art is just made by Just a Human
without tools, without technology of some sort.
It becomes even more valuable and more interesting.
And now there's more room for more people to express.
So it's really, really special.
Hey, I think you also forgot to mention pencil and paper artists.
Justice for pencil and paper artists as well.
Oh, they're wonderful. Yeah, we want them.
We want more people to do what this is all about,
And it's not a battle for labels or putting people out of work.
I think the people who are most anti-AI art
are some of the most unpleasant people.
And I think that they need therapy. I think they need help.
I see that there's a master film maker,
Mr. Substance Hollywood, Alex Rotaro just joined us as well.
I wanted to give him a shout out.
If he wants to speak something, I'd be very willing to hear.
This guy really knows what he's doing.
Love him as a friend as well.
Alex, please. Yeah, for sure.
Likewise, a friend of mine.
Alex, please step up if you're lurking,
lurking listening in to Vesta or that.
Thanks, Saita. Really interesting.
I mean, I think you shared view here of everyone
on the panel in terms of using these tools
to be more creative and unlock your creativity.
So there are a couple of other people here
that have been patiently waiting.
Edna, do you have any questions at all for Vesta?
Hi. I wanted to just, I guess, bring up a few points
that I thought of while listening to everyone speaking
So some of the things that Citadel mentioned
reminded me of John Berger's Ways of Seeing.
It's a collection of essays about art.
My background is not in any visual art.
Mine is the literary arts.
And so what this essay at one point discusses
is the invention of photography
did put certain kinds of artists out of business,
say the people who were dedicated
to just painting portraits, for example.
But it also kind of pushed visual art.
He pointed out that one of the photography-influenced
painting movements was cubism,
where if the camera is forced to take a picture
from one specific viewpoint, then at least in cubism,
there is this idea of what would the object look like
if you portray it from many viewpoints
at the same time on a 2D surface.
So I did think that that was quite reassuring,
in a sense, that, oh, okay,
so technology will continue to advance,
but it just means that the artist has to try harder
to come up with more interesting ideas.
And I do think that one really wonderful thing
that people have pointed out is that
with technology, you increase,
art becomes more democratized,
like it's more accessible for people to,
it is cheaper for them to be able to create AI art
than to go to a school to learn.
And I mean, I did hear, I think it was Vasa who said
that art education has become like this money industry.
And I would agree to some extent that yes,
it does kind of create this easy way out,
like people who don't want to put in the work
of diddling around and just trying and failing
to just pay money, go to a school
and like be told what to think about art.
But at some point, I actually do believe that there are,
it is almost like a replacement for what in times past
were apprenticeships, for example,
like there is a history of great artists
teaching younger, newer artists
and kind of choosing them based on the potential
that they see and kind of going,
hey, I'm creating art in this place,
come join me and you will be able to learn from me.
And I mean, whether they succeed or not
is still a question mark, but it is a history
that has happened in painting.
It's happened in literature.
A lot of people criticize, for example,
MFA programs for literature, for creative writing.
But it remains the case that a lot of the great writers
past like Hemingway was greatly inspired by,
I believe, Gertrude Stein.
They had like a really long literary friendship
where they, Gertrude Stein gave a lot of feedback
on his writing when he was still up and coming.
So I feel like there is nuance to a lot of these issues,
but I think the greatest fear that I have
with regard to art as someone who wants to create art
is that instead of a tool to assist the creation of art,
that it will become a generator of art,
that there will just be mass production
where the human element is writing a prompt,
cranking a lever, and then it just spits out mass-produced art.
And what that's going to do a lot of
is kind of decreasing the value, right?
Like one of the other speakers asked a question
about accessing AI art because someone complained
that the art that she was making was too expensive.
And I'm like, okay, well, the marriage between commerce
and art has always been a little screwed up.
It seems like it will get worse.
And I think one of my biggest concerns is that
a lot of people don't care or pay enough attention to art
to really even notice that mass-produced art
is usually not very good.
A case in point would be, say,
you go on any AI-generated, like Spotify,
the algo-driven Spotify playlist,
and you'll see a lot of mass-produced songs
to chill out to while working kind of vibes.
And it's definitely content that was created with a purpose.
I don't know if I would call it art.
I know some people will say that that opinion is snobby,
but I think that when that kind of thoughtless consumption
comes at the cost of people
who are putting a lot of thought into their art,
then I do think it is net a social ill.
Well, if I may say a comment in between,
because there were so many different points,
and I just always take an opportunity
to promote the work of the machine gun intellect,
that is Camille Palia, the great cultural critic,
who is mostly prominent in the 90s and 2000s,
but essentially she said that the university's arts education
has become sort of a buffet of pick and choose what you want.
It doesn't go all the way to Egypt,
and you don't learn about the great religions.
You don't learn about the people who have contended
and kind of have to wrestle with them anymore,
because you just pick whatever you like,
and she has this one wonderful lecture
called Art Belongs to Everyone that is on YouTube
that I always try to push,
because she does a great wonderful critique
of how while I'm similar,
everyone here now has nearly a PFP
as their profile picture,
and the whole crypto movement and NFTs and everything,
it elevated the kind of baseline of creativity
and what we can do with our lives so much,
but I'm mainly concerned about the top end.
I'm not the best to talk about all the other things.
All my focus is going on to how there would be
a true evolution of things,
and whether I'm there or not,
or whether I make it or not is neither here or there
but that is the aim of how to get to this whole thing.
So it's great that some parts are democratized,
but even, let's say, in the NFT space,
some of the biggest money is going to,
say, someone like Beeple,
and it's funny, it's gross,
it's these massive throbbing crypto penises
but I would say it's a far cry
from the work of Da Vinci
or the Pieta by Michelangelo.
It's like, is this truly the best that our culture
can produce in terms of substances
and what is going to be left of us
as the peak of what we were capable of at this time?
That's what I despair about.
I think the democracy part is fantastic,
and we've certainly done it,
and all power to anyone doing anything creative
and making their lives better,
but I don't see that we much have yet
an exploration of what would be possible now
with all of these tools that we have
with the best of humanity,
exploring our consciousness,
merging it together with science and technology
at the very peak of it that would be substantial
for us to pay attention to it
in a way that doesn't go into computer games
or the best movies or something like that.
So that's what I would say.
I want to see the high end,
and I'm unapologetic about it.
I don't care if someone thinks that it's snobby.
They're not aiming to kind of do things at that level,
and it probably scares them, and that's fine.
but it just happens to be something that I'm striving towards,
and hopefully I'll do, if I fall from high,
that's great and not achieve any of those things,
but I think it's honest and great to have that intent,
and as artists, it's wrong to rob them of their ambition
in the midst of all of this democratization,
and that's what I hope to stand for.
Can I just jump in there around,
well, what you said, democratization?
But I think sometimes people who are very talented
or skilled kind of goes back to my earlier point,
which is I would love to be able to produce
the types of artwork that Bessie,
or does, or any of the other colleagues in the space.
So I'm in a different camp, which is I'm still creative.
I don't like to produce things that I've mass-produced
or the same as everything else,
and where I can have my unique spin on it,
but to rob someone like myself who is at heart a creative
of being able to get the output I like
just because I'm not as skilled as certain people.
I don't necessarily see that as an issue,
which I know conflicts maybe, Edna, with your point.
I'm trying to make a point that all of this is great,
but I would love to see more focus,
what produced the previous Renaissance in Italy
was that the Medicis specifically looked for the best artists
and they looked for the best scientists,
and they produced awe and wonder for us to go back to Italy
centuries after not nearly understanding how all of that stuff was made,
let alone the Egyptian pyramids and whatever.
We're standing on the shoulders of absolute giants
of culture and human peril of how we got here,
and I think we're treating all of that very lightly at the moment.
If you look at someone's work like, let's say, Carl Jung,
and all of a sudden what you just see is the ramblings of a straight white man,
then I think we've lost a significant part of our intellect as a species,
and I don't think that's a great thing.
So that's what I'm after, is that more of the top is supported.
I think the Bitcoin decentralized family needs to assume its role
as the decentralized Medici to fund and fix all the things that it critiques.
I know this is not a crypto show, but saying that these are somewhat interlinked as ideas.
We've got big crypto ideas here as well, by the way.
Yeah, sorry. Just to briefly respond to you, Sif,
I think what you're talking about really reminds me of when I reflect on
what does it look like to even go from just,
I diddled around with something creative the other day for fun to,
oh, I create art. What does that process look like?
And I think it is really powerful to say that a lot of people that I know
who say work in 2D animation or people around me who are poets and writers,
a lot of us began the same way as you.
There was no conscious intent to create art.
We were just literally diddling around is the word I like to use for it.
And at some point, I think what happens is when you yourself notice that,
hey, for whatever reason, this random thing I did is slightly better
than some of the other random things I did.
And you start following that train of thought,
and then you start to look at other creations.
You look at other pieces of art, and you start to notice,
hey, I am developing a taste in art.
I'm starting to notice that there are things that I like better
or that work better than others.
And then as you do that, let's say, for example,
if it was visual art, which I have been kind of trying to learn
about what drives other forms of art other than like literature,
which is the only thing I do, so I've been looking a lot at,
like, you know, how do visual artists look at art?
So then I'm reading about, like, okay, they're looking at line
and shape and form and shadow.
And I'm doing the same thing kind of for music.
And I think when you start to kind of pay more attention
and study, that is kind of that process.
So I don't look down at all on, like, the quote-unquote
diddling part of art, because that is what leads to more.
I think when I say I'm concerned about, like,
the way that the technology will lead to, like, just auto-crank out
of art, I think that's a different concern.
I, like, do not at all look down on, like, the part of art where
one thing people say when writers start to get writer's block
is a lot of the time it's because we're overintellectualizing.
Like, there is a self-critic, and that's valuable.
You need the critic when you are editing your work.
But when you are creating, you kind of try to go back to that
childlike place of, like, just curiosity and, like, complete non-judgment
and give yourself permission to create.
I mean, I have so many notes on my phone full of what I call trash,
but I cannot really dig for it. Sorry.
Yeah, if I can jump in there.
So it's interesting, because I think we're still speaking
from the same place, which is mass-produced with no thought.
I totally agree with you, but using AI as a tool
to produce what you want the output to be,
I don't think is necessarily an issue.
You mentioned, for example, it's all about the lines,
the shape, the form, the shadowing.
For me, using an AI tool, I try to learn best practice
in terms of anything I'm using AI for,
so I can build that into the prompt,
so I can build it into the process.
So it's not just one slap-dash lazy prompt,
which says, produce me X output,
but it's this series of prompts that you're working with the tool with
to tailor it to what you're actually after.
And I think, for me, it's actually allowed me to learn more
about, from my standpoint, graphic design,
or art, or coding, or any of the other things
that you can use this type of technology for.
And actually, it's made me more engrossed
and appreciative of what these different creative outputs
And I think the key takeaway of what I'm saying here is,
don't use AI in a lazy slap-dash way to mass produce
Work with it and use it as a tool to maybe be more efficient
Go into chat DPT and say,
what is best practice of X?
Or dump a photo or a picture that you like
or a piece of art into chat DPT and say,
That has unlocked a lot of value to me
where I may have had to go to an expert
in a different time and age,
or someone of the Ilk or Vesser
who's been crafting and studying this for years.
Not everyone has that type of access,
but with AI and chat GPT,
it goes back to what we said,
which is democratizing learning
and democratizing creativity
to be able to actually achieve the output you've got in mind.
So I think we're singing from the same hymnsheet
in terms of lazy, mass-produced approaches
to content creation or creativity.
But yeah, I don't know what your thoughts are there
or what Vesser thinks about anything I've said around
actually leveraging the tool.
I think most importantly,
you're just falling forward
with all these tools at your disposal
I mean, Joe Rogan became the biggest podcaster in the world
with the widest audience by, as he says,
basically just being curious and asking questions.
And I did the same with all of these different tools
whether to learn filmmaking,
but I wasn't educated as a photographer.
No one told me how to use Photoshop.
And I've fallen forward consistently
with all of these things if they become interesting.
And what Edna was saying that I've really resonated
and talking of Carl Jung is he said that intellectualism
is a common cover-up for the fear of the direct experience.
So I very much resonate with what you were saying with that
is that it's like I'm not afraid of...
I don't like it any more than anyone else to look a fool.
It's a horrible experience socially
to kind of bomb in front of people in any kind of way.
But I do have a goal in mind to become better
and if I need to look an idiot in the process of that
and stumble and fall and say something stupid
or whatever it is, it results in a net positive after a while.
So I would very much just encourage you
to go along with that curiosity and that path
and not be too afraid to look a fool sometimes
and then you'll end up in a place
that looks like magic to other people
who haven't even taken the first step
when you've taken a hundred.
So that's kind of how the process works
and that's universal for all of us, I guess.
I don't know if Edna also resonates with that.
I'm sorry, I just want to jump in.
Edna, thanks for your contribution.
Definitely an interesting point.
I've seen that Arena has been patient
in a way since I would like to bring it into the conversation.
If you're still there, of course.
And in the meantime, Alex, you've stepped up.
So if you'd like to unmute, I'll be honest.
Well, I was giggling earlier.
First of all, incredible conversation as always.
I was giggling because I was looking at my,
And I actually have a fragment of a Tiepolo painting,
So for once, I don't have an NFT-type avatar here.
I resonate with everything that's being said,
My field is writing and filmmaking.
I'm making a documentary.
I'm making a documentary right now about the connection
between AI and espionage.
And I believe that the biggest issue is...
Alex, don't ruin all of it.
You might be on a show soon.
But here's what I'm finding out.
I'm finding out that I don't know.
And it's a place of discomfort.
And I think that it's important to be uncomfortable as an artist
and not rely on what you know already.
But launch yourself fearlessly, like Carl Jung did,
And the willingness to learn and the willingness to adapt
are going to, I believe, characterize who succeeds
and whatever success might mean in one instance versus another.
the only way to get the color blue in painting
was to import extremely expensive, precious stones,
lapis lazuli, from Afghanistan,
and ground them into powder.
And then when chemistry caught up,
all of a sudden you had oil paints
that all of a sudden blue became much more prevalent in paintings.
Technology offers artists of all kinds
opportunities to stretch outside of their comfort zones.
And this is a very good point that Edna brought up.
I have a fridge magnet that says,
So that speaks to the dialogue between the left brain
And it's important to keep that in mind.
And it's important to keep that conduit open
and be curious and ask questions.
I think we live in a very exciting time.
And if we look back 10 years from now
at what AI, generative AI, or artistically used AI
is achieving today, it'll be very interesting.
Hopefully we can circle back, not in 10 years,
but regularly and see how it's progressing.
But I'm just very excited to be in this community
and add my own ignorance to the general excitement
of ignorance that we live in.
Well, you can't add more ignorance
in this type of topic than I can.
I'm simply facilitating a lot of experts here.
But Alex, well, and I guess for the audience,
we've got someone from the film world
on a show coming up in a couple of weeks.
So Alex, I'll invite you to that too.
It'd be interesting to get your thoughts.
I know we spoke about that a couple of weeks ago.
So I'll post a note to you after this conversation.
Thanks for your comments there.
I know you've been patiently waiting.
As always, conversations with Vesa
is a next-level conversation.
So I really enjoyed what you are discussing here.
And Vesa, as I always say,
you are not only a visual artist,
but you're also an artist of discourses.
And I'm a big fan of your intellectual work as well.
And this is really, really exciting.
I was actually playing with AI avatars
and then saw this space and jumped in
because I thought that it's really an interesting coincidence.
The thing that is happening right now to me
in the Web3, in AI space, in the world in general,
is very exciting because we're leaving
in this moment of a big change,
a big geopolitical shift,
and what has been mentioned today in the sweeter space.
There is a big question about education.
There is a big question about education being commercialized.
And if you look at the number of art schools
if you look at the availability
and the ease of joining an art school,
I think this is unprecedented
because if we look back in times,
there was very limited number of schools.
You had to be a pupil of an established artist,
and you had to go through a very long process of tutoring,
being part of a specific school, specific movement,
really master your skills,
or earn an academic education.
Still at the times of Dali and Picasso,
academic education was a necessary step to become an artist.
Nowadays, I'm an architect.
My background is architecture. I went to an academia,
and in my days, it was still obligatory
to do academic painting, academic drawing,
and I see that this is being removed, replaced,
eased in many schools around the world nowadays.
So there is no necessity anymore
for many schools to teach this subject.
It's considered to be something from the past
and something outdated, which I find is a big mistake,
because if you don't know fundamentals,
you really cannot disrupt, transform,
play with the form in a very clever way.
So if you look at what Picasso has done,
you can clearly see for every artist,
for every even art student, it would be very evident
how the form is very intelligently transformed, dissected,
and you need to have a lot of knowledge
to do these kind of manipulations.
Second thing, education became a commercial thing.
Education is an industry.
There are many more private schools,
and education is boldly something you pay for.
They push you an MBA, they push you whatever course,
three master degrees, because also our economy
is at the stage where young people cannot make a living.
When we live in an extreme inflation,
devaluation of every currency around the world,
it's nearly impossible to buy a property,
and this is the fundamental problem,
and this is why so many people are jumping
to any opportunity they can find to make a living.
And then we have this digital disruption.
We have social media like Instagram.
It became available just sort of around 2010.
Before that, we were not really able to share information,
to share visuals, to build our portfolios,
creative work, a personal website,
until pretty much 10, 15 years ago.
The same thing is not happening with AI.
There are so many people who stepped
into the machine learning AI space decades ago,
but it wasn't available to public like chat GTP is now.
So everybody can play with that now.
And I believe we need to distinguish
the use of technology for professionals.
So when we talk about, because, you know,
there are also many, something that is very disturbing to me.
What on earth does it mean?
Do you have a profession, right?
We all have some sort of profession,
and there are tools that we can use like AI.
If you are a professional writer,
you would use AI to aid you to summarize information,
to become your knowledge assistant, etc., etc.
If you are an artist, you can use AI
to maybe add some experimentation,
find some information, find some visual, test it,
like if you would do a sketch, but you would do it with AI now.
And it's a tool, but it's not the means.
It doesn't have any creative spark.
It doesn't have, you know, who is a creator?
Also, what comes next in my, for me to question.
A creator is, you know, is God,
is the divine part of each of us
that is able to create something new?
What is so creative about AI?
It has the ability to generate information,
or combine information from all of us
to sort of tap into our collective intelligence.
how we use this information,
the way and the level we understand
how this impacts us as a collective,
this would be really a change maker.
If we understand that, you know,
you can connect and you can become a community
and maybe this will open more collaborative space for artists.
I'm pretty sure that the world will not be the same
for the next decade with so much open information.
Before we were used to things like open code
innovation in the open source was something normal
and something that really sparked
a lot of new applications and boosted developments.
we are really seeing the boost of creativity,
let's say, people seeing something new
and then reflecting and thinking
and going back and maybe studying something new,
maybe discovering some information
they were not able to access before.
And here comes another question about ethics.
So if you're able to access all this open information
and all this creativity and all this artworks,
are you an artist and a creator yourself?
Or you are stealing like an artist from others' creativity?
Because as Vesa, you said it takes years of learning,
of experience, of mastering your skill,
Why good architects become known,
become valuable, their work becomes valuable
when they're about around 60, 70 years old?
Because to create a piece of architecture,
especially a public building,
it takes you as a person a lot of experience.
You need to travel a lot.
You need to learn philosophy, culture, technology, law,
a lot of things, painting, drawing,
you need to travel, right?
You need to live in different spaces and places
like many great architects like GaudÃ
who would come to the site,
observe how the light hits the facade
and then sculpt it right there and then at the spot.
So this, for me, it's an amazing conversation
and there are so many outcomes and so many points of view
and from every individual, from every professional,
we would see different applications of AI,
different users, but also different threats.
This is what I was reflecting while listening to you.
If I can just say that it's a mutual fan club,
it's always a joy kind of discussing with you
what the spaces that we did together before
was really one of the best ones
that I've probably ever been a part of
and I definitely appreciate always your perspective as well.
I didn't know that you were classically trained in that way as well
and the same goes for Alex,
is that when we met with Alex in Dubai
as he was doing this interview for the Shisha Finance crew
and I was an advisor there and got interviewed by Alex
and I just realized that there was,
I gave one of the best interviews up until then
that I'd ever given and it was all to do with his skill
and then when I got to know that he knows all the classics
and everything even much better than I,
he puts my education to shame.
But he had played with all of these great ideas
and the master so much that he was able to bring mastery
even to something as simple as an interview
that is essentially a corporate gig
so that he's shown through as an artist and we became friends
and that's the power of the big questions
and I would say to Irina to your point is that
I very much echo what your concern is
that because to some degree that in our arts
we now look to the past of the philosophy and mystic kind of,
let's say even from the 60s consciousness evolution
and revolution and what happened there
that kind of then got corporatized and bureaucratized
into something that we don't even recognize
of what the actual theme was about.
We are now looking in our arts
as something that is the best part of maybe
like just a DJ to some of those ideas
that people wrestled with in the past in the history lens
and that's not a very popular opinion.
I don't think many would share it
but objectively seeing with all the ideas wrestled in the past
and what people have said,
I don't think we've done a massive contribution.
Maybe in the public intellectuals
we have some very fantastic people doing that
but I don't yet see it in the arts as much
and we're very much looking like a very mediocre time
even though the bottom of humanity's creativity
and what is the evolution of the species
in this kind of way is fantastic
and maybe that's where we have been at our most stellar
but I would hope that we get to a much more profound space
in our kind of consciousness exploration of where we're now
and what we can do with this technology
that is truly going to be impactful to us
for us to be still remembering
why it is important to be human to begin with.
If I may interject, by the way Vesta,
stop it, stop it more and more.
I think that, look, when you go to classical museums
often you'll see beautiful paintings that bear the mark
school of, school of, atelier of
and it was an apprentice or several apprentices
working under a master and working in the style of that master.
You know, if you have, let's say horses,
AI right now is kind of a general purpose
to a certain degree store-bought horse
You train a race horse differently than you train,
let's say, a different type, a labor horse.
I think that an interesting thing
and a development that I believe is going on
and it depends individually on us
is to start training in the visual space, for instance,
visual, large language models specifically.
For instance, subset the information and the wisdom.
I was thinking when, you know, I was speaking about Dali,
before he found his own style,
if you look at his academic paintings
he could paint like anyone, literally like anyone.
He could mock up a Pizarro or Rembrandt
and there are occasionally exhibits
of his lesser known work from his academic years
where he really painted like anyone
until he found his own surrealist dream landscape
and then he started developing.
But for instance, if you take an open source visual LLM
and you train it exclusively on Dali, what can happen then?
What we have now is these, I'll say it again,
store-bought AIs like Dali or the other one,
Mid-Journey or Stable Diffusion that are trained,
well, they're trained generally.
There's a lot of stuff put in there.
There's manga-style commercial art
and there's classical paintings and there are posters
and there's a smorgasbord and kind of a mixture of input
that makes these images to be quite distinctive
and to have a certain glossy surreal colors
minus all the problems that happen
with the rendering of hands and all that.
But the interesting development that I'm looking forward to
is educated visual artists like the people I see on this group
taking it upon themselves to start training
specific large language models for specific,
and that's happening in many, many aspects.
There's AIs for accounting.
There's AIs for checking material science papers
for building airplanes and specs.
But in the artistic space,
I think it's time to stop depending on these behemoth
commercial, subscribe for $30 a month
and we'll make pictures for you
and rather go into the nitty-gritty.
Da Vinci and other great masters,
they worked with the tools.
They invented new things.
And it's interesting because in the word invention,
invenide, it literally means to come into, to find.
It's the same as the word discover.
But we were using them differently right now in English.
That's the specificity of making this tool our own
is I think where the really exciting specific developments can happen.
If we rely on what's available out there,
we are at the mercy of whatever the material used for training
and I mean general and not as in generalized AI intelligence,
Alex, if I may, these are fantastic points.
You know, your speech now made me also reflect on one thing.
I was recently rereading Kandinsky and Malevich
and the entire Cosmis movement and the Russian avant-garde
was actually pretty much focused on spirituality.
And this whole revolution that is happening in the world,
to me, is also largely a war between humanists and transhumanists.
And arts have always been facing humanity
like Picasso was the initiator of the peace movement.
And we are at the point of many conflicts in the world,
many, and these conflicts are mainly to me
because we have lost this spirituality.
We became so consumished and so concerned about producing something quickly,
being this content creators that are constantly posting something
from any possible social media and just monetizing, monetizing.
Web3 space, NFT, in the last bull run, everything was about monetizing.
We don't care about how innovative it is.
We don't care how advanced it is.
We just want to make a quick buck.
And this greed-driven space, it did benefit many.
It did make people money.
But it didn't create the real fundamental change,
neither in the art world nor in the, you know,
didn't really progress as humanity.
And I believe that if we pay more attention to spirituality,
to the message, to the fundamental values that creatives, art world,
writers betraying this world, then things may change.
So I would like to ask every speaker here,
what do you think about the role of spirituality in the art world
and especially in the digital art world?
If I may reply real quickly, thank you.
I will never forget Malevich for what he did to Shagal.
This is a different story altogether.
And thank you for opening my eyes to the fact that there was a war of spirituality.
I was under the impression that Malevich was more...
Kandinsky, yes, but I was under the impression that Malevich was more on Lenin's side, basically.
But I think the idea of spirituality is unavoidable in, yes,
this conflict that's going on, but it's unavoidable in AI because AI is God-like.
And the idea and the notion of God is going to have to be subjected to a new level of scrutiny because of this.
And that being said, that's all I wanted to add and I'll open the field to everyone else.
Well, if I may, because this has obviously been a big exploration of mine
ever since I was a kid and kind of going in between the atheistic parents and being connected to something
and then growing up in a super secular Finnish society and kind of struggling with these themes,
it does seem that also the whatever homogenized thing that the art world, establishment art world has become,
it's just snickers at something like spirituality and it's even censored it quite heavily.
Blavatsky being an inspiration for Pollock and that's not being very much talked about.
It's something that has severed our connection, whether it is primitive belief or whether it's more sophisticated,
it doesn't matter, I think it's a part of the reason why we have such a huge mental problem
is that we've severed that connection to the point of where people are very afraid of talking about any of those areas
without kind of coming across as crazy or kooky or something like that and it's a great, great shame
because even Hilma of Klint, for whatever reason, she didn't publish her works,
she would have been considered the mother of abstraction
and I do think that her works are actually much more profound and interesting than most of the big names
that were doing abstraction at that time.
Regardless, she felt that the world just wasn't ready to receive what she was saying
and it's only now that we recently see her works being celebrated in the sense that they would be
and what I, for example, wanted to do with the Super World collaboration,
we built the Egyptian Luxor Temple in the virtual reality
because I got to know the story of this temple that essentially tells the story of man or Pharaoh,
how he or she goes from birth to transcendence
and if the Pharaoh lives like, is inscribed into this human-shaped temple is,
if they live well, then the society around them is also cohesively held together
and when I learned the story about this magnificent building that is ruins now but still fantastic
and I went there to visit it, I was so profoundly impacted that we haven't really built anything like that
for centuries or thousands of years and we don't have that kind of consciousness to build buildings from that perspective at all
and I've been sold this whole idea that humanity since the caveman days up until now has been nothing but progress
and from this perspective, all of a sudden, a lot of what we have now started to look like regress
and that was an interesting kind of flip of the script
and so I thought, okay, well, what if we take this temple and what it represents
and we put it in virtual reality and then we make it my personal art gallery
and then that is all of a sudden the representation of some of what is the best of the past
showcasing what is now possible and then giving people ideas of what soon will be
because my dream would be that AI would be there soon in this temple telling the story of the temple
knowing each of the artworks intimately that is embedded into this structure
and working as a 24-7 curator, having conversations with people who come there
and even learns from their feedback in real time of how they experience it and how it could be made better
you know, so this kind of thing is, if you're not to your question, I don't think many questions matter as much
as the conversions of art and spirituality and what they can do together
because essentially we probably started making art because we found some strange mushrooms
and started seeing the cosmos and ourselves differently
and then it was usurped by grand mosques and churches and temples and whatever
and they started using the provenance and power of artists to interpret some of the grand stories
of what we had to inspire people and inspire awe
and then now for the most part when we go to galleries where I don't know what your expectation of
many times that you go to galleries is but the direct impact of awe is not always the case
and this is sort of probably to do a lot with our personal severance to spiritual practice
I would say more importantly than any other philosophy because it's as much of an inner science as it is anything else
if you have that perspective you're never really in a drought of creativity because you're connected to creation itself
and those are the kinds of themes that I wish that it becomes more available for people to explore
without ridicule or this kind of very contemporary secular point of view that we have to art
that is just not cutting it for people
that's why art is not as relevant as it is to more people because that connection hasn't been there for a long time
we have lost a lot of the wisdom of the Egyptians
and going back to Gustav Jung when he wrote his famous Lament of the Dead
he starts the first sentence is look not toward Jerusalem, turn your gaze upon Alexandria
and there are two authors in particular a deceased author called Schwaller de Lubitsch
and the contemporary author a genius woman called Susan Brind Morrow
who have done a lot of work to unravel some of the hidden wisdom having to do with the convergence of spirituality and art in Egyptian mythology
and especially in Egyptian architecture
and the interesting thing about the Luxor temple, you and I never got to talk about this
is that it's fashioned upon the human body
and for a very long time architects and archaeologists that examined the buildings in Egypt
came to the conclusion that they had an interior, from a western standpoint, an interior way of building
because there are imperfections
the rooms are not perfectly rectangular, they're almost rectangular
and what in many respects that means is that the building upon the structure of the human body
was essential to Egyptian, ancient Egyptian architecture
and one particularly interesting point
and if you look at Gabb and Newt at the Egyptian
or mythology of the union of the earth and the sky
the paintings of the goddess of the sky encircling and unfolding the god of earth that has an erection
the erection is not in the place where it is on a human body
it is in the axis mundi, it's in the navel, it's in the umbilical area
and that's reflected in Luxor in the area of the temple that corresponds to the penis
not in the crotch area, it's in the umbilical area
there's a lot embedded in what western architecture has considered
the imperfections or the lack of skill of the designers of the architects of Egyptian structures
that actually are stories that they're telling us through these buildings
that we're not paying attention to
Well this is so beautiful that we start to bring these to the surface
and there's potentially people in the audience who will be building their own digital spaces
and they can go back and be maybe inspired by some of those stories and make their own iterations
and this is how we fall forward utilizing some of the best from the past with modern tools
and really crafting something that is an exciting future
I think that's the, all of these things converge
the NFTs, crypto, metaverse, AI, all of these tools need one another
and this is why I often, even if this is an AI show
I'll talk about art or consciousness or crypto or whatever, all of those things
because they're interlinked and utilized at best in convergence
to really get at something that is a holistic experience
and that's it, it's like they all have something to contribute to one another
so that they become more efficient at helping us be better
I'm going to hop in here for a second because Yousuf has not been able to get back up
he's having technical difficulties
I think this is a good stopping point or at least a wrapping up point
simply because I'm not well so I can't facilitate
as I typically am doing on these spaces
but I genuinely enjoyed the conversation
this is the first time we've had an AI show on the Mobi Media podium
and I think that Yousuf really got the right speaker in you, Vesa
and I really appreciate all of these audience members
coming up and adding their insight and their input
and I hope everyone enjoyed listening to the conversation as much as I did
Vesa, if you wanted to give some closing statements
or if anyone else on the panel wants to give some closing statements
go ahead and do so now, otherwise it's been an absolute pleasure
Thank you so so very much, Noah
it's been a real pleasure Yousuf, thank you so much
and everyone who's been listening, like I said at the beginning
I don't take any of these opportunities for granted to talk to people
especially a bunch of new people and I hope it resonated
and I hope it gave even just a fragment of something towards your journey
and it's really been a joy and then all of a sudden with friends like Rina and Alex
and to listen to Edna and Captain Levy, thank you for your contribution as well
and with all of these high and mighty things said and whatever it is
I'd just like to leave you with one statement which is, by my art
Well again, thank you everyone for joining, I'm going to wrap things up here
Mobi Media community, remember everything you hear on this broadcast
is meant for educational purposes only, nothing is financial advice
so be safe out there and we'll see you all on the next one
We're going to be doing the AI shows at 10pm Eastern Standard Time
I believe it's 3pm UTC until Daylight Savings kicks in again
So this was, we had to move things around for this episode
but typically they will be at 10am Eastern Standard Time
and we'll be doing this weekly, Yusef is going to be running the show
we'll be supporting and so if you have any questions
if you want to be part of the panel, if you want to come on as a speaker
and get involved in these AI conversations and shoot Yusef at DM
shoot me at DM, we're happy to get you on, take care