The Artist Is Still in the Room

<div class="wp-block-group is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained"> <h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-case-for-practical-optimism-a-dispatch-from-shared-futures-the-ai-forum-at-the-times-center">The case for practical optimism. A dispatch from Shared Futures: the AI Forum, at the Times Center.</h4> <p class="">At the Times Center on June 17, I watched a man build a drum kit out of his own mouth. Reggie Watts performed solo, looping his voice into a beat and singing about artificial intelligence in a language made up of just vowels. He paused to say that humans keep trying to build versions of ourselves outside ourselves because we’re never satisfied with who we are. Then he went back to the beat, and I wrote that line down. I’ve felt this before: it’s unsettling when someone tells me a hard truth while I was having fun. All day, I saw serious people circling the same idea but never quite reaching it.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed alignwide is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Shared Futures 2026" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2qNWXNMzKkU?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p class=""><strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/live/2qNWXNMzKkU?si=G21SkhNwjU_A5K0b">Shared Futures: The AI Forum</a> was put together by Aspen Digital and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation</strong>. The atmosphere was mostly hopeful. Artists showed what they had made with machines. A poet performed with a language model trained on her own work. A roboticist talked about teaching machines to move with emotion. The main message, repeated on stage, was that art has always changed with new technology, and AI is just the most recent step. What happens next is up to us.</p> <p class="">I mostly agree with that idea. Still, in the present moment, the uncertainty about what will happen next can make me feel terribly uncomfortable. A discomfort that was sharply photographed by the data revealed that day by Monica Anderson from the <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-and-ai-2026-chatbots-smart-devices-and-views-on-impact/">Pew Research Center</a>. Half of American adults now use chatbots, but most feel more anxious than excited about the technology. There’s a big gap between what experts and the public think, with their views almost completely opposite. The only area where Americans expect AI to do more good than harm is medicine. When it comes to art, jobs, and news, people are more worried. Oddly, people under 30 use these tools the most, but they are also the most pessimistic about their impact. It turns out that being familiar with these tools doesn’t make people more comfortable. In fact, the opposite is true.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image alignwide size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1500" height="844" style="object-position:50% 50%" src="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/pew-research-Jun-2026-1500x844.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-242036"/></figure> <p class="">That uneasiness was obvious. Sougwen Chung, who has spent over ten years drawing with robotic arms, reminded us that the word robot comes from the Czech word robota, which means forced labor. Before robots were machines, the word appeared in <a href="https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/origin-word-robot-rur/">R.U.R</a>., a 1920 play that questioned whose work is recognized and whose is taken, and what a creation owes its creator. AI, Chung said, “decouples artifact from process, results from labor.” It removes the body. That was the most precise sentence I heard all day. It pointed directly at everything the event chose not to discuss. It was a celebration and avoided talking about the writers whose books trained these systems without permission, and the low-paid workers who cleaned up the models’ outputs. Behind a fluency that seems to appear out of nowhere, there is hidden, concentrated human labor. The goal wasn’t to ignore that reality, but to make (an absolutely legitimate) case for practical optimism.</p> <p class="">The strongest argument came from Taryn Southern, who works with a company that makes brain implants. Her story eased my skepticism. She talked about freezing up on live TV as a teenager on American Idol, quitting singing, and how most creative projects end at the 30% mark when things get tough and people give up. She said making things is more “a test of resilience” than creativity. Then she showed videos of paralyzed patients who, using brain implants, can paint and make music just by thinking. One recorded a rock song with his implant. Another sold his first digital painting to help others like him. She called it art made with their thoughts—a new frontier that didn’t exist until they made it real. No matter how I feel about a novelist’s chatbot, it’s hard to watch someone create music they couldn’t otherwise make and call the tool a thief.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image alignwide size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1500" height="844" style="object-position:50% 50%" src="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Music-with-his-thoughts-1500x844.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-241007"/></figure> <p class=""><strong>I should declare a stake of my own. </strong>In the before times, I didn’t have a name for the deeper issue inside my brain. I always thought my problem was insisting on writing in a language that wasn’t my first. The mechanics of writing—spelling, organizing sentences, and keeping a long argument straight—have always been harder for me than the thinking itself. For years, the gap between what I wanted to say and what I could put on the page felt like a private tax, paid in hours and unfinished work. By the time I learned what to call it, I had already learned how to mask it. “Neurodivergent” rhymed with tangent. In Spanish, we say huyendo por la tangente, or escaping along it, and that, it turned out, was the word for how I&#8217;d lived. I distrusted these tools precisely because I had spent a lifetime masking effort, and they mask it too. Now, these tools take over the parts that wear me out, like worrying about typos and awkward phrases, Spanglish metáforas, and translated wit. They leave me with what only I can do: my convoluted constructions and my choice about what matters. So when Southern talked about work that dies at the 30% mark, I wasn’t thinking in the abstract. I was remembering my own experience.</p> <p class="">So which is it: a helpful tool or a shortcut that makes us lazy? Are we just cutting corners? I want to believe the more generous answer, but that makes me cautious. All day, it seemed the answer was that it depends on what you let the machine do for you. Poppy Crum, a neuroscientist, explained how using a tool changes your brain. She described an MIT study where people wrote essays with a chatbot, with a search engine, or by themselves. Only the chatbot group showed their brain activity slowing down, with fewer mental connections than when someone is really thinking. When you skip the hard work of understanding, you might sound like you know what you’re talking about, but you don’t, and that’s a &#8220;deep fake of competence.&#8221;</p> <p class="">On the train from DC to NYC, I read an essay by Adam Kirsch in <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/ai-writing-style-literature/687536/">The Atlantic.</a> He argued that AI writing has &#8220;no fixed style&#8221; because it has &#8220;no fixed self,&#8221; and that its prose is &#8220;conventions all the way down.&#8221; It feels fluent because it has memorized everything, but also hollow because it has lived nothing. By the afternoon, that line felt less like criticism and more like a caption for the whole event. The poets and painters there were doing what the model can’t: bringing their own lives into their work. The model never fell on a playground at age five. That was Lynn Maxcy, a screenwriter who told a small panel that she doesn’t use AI in her writing. She believes a system that predicts everything from what’s already been said makes it harder, not easier, to imagine a future that hasn’t happened yet. AI could read five billion books and still not write her sentences, because, in the end, it was never married to her husband.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed alignwide is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe loading="lazy" title="Shared Futures 2026- AI Supporting Human-Powered Journalism at The Times" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3Qc0V6IvZrA?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <p class=""><strong>The keynote speaker was <a href="https://youtu.be/3Qc0V6IvZrA?si=7DqbwVcB6s98_K5r">Meredith Kopit Levien</a>, CEO of The New York Times.</strong> She is the head of an organization that both uses these tools and is suing the companies that make them. Kopit Levien began by mentioning that the paper turns 175 this year. She said the Times has survived by always adopting new technology, not just for its own sake, but to improve journalism, reach more people, and strengthen its mission.</p> <p class="">The tools can change, but the mission cannot. She keeps them separate by what she calls naming the immutables: deciding which things can’t change without losing the value of the work, and leaving everything else open to change. For the Times, the thing that can’t change is reporting, and it’s sending more trained people out to find the truth and turn it into something readers can use. Machines can help with that work, but they can’t do it alone. They can’t witness things that haven’t been written down yet. She prefers to say &#8220;human-led&#8221; instead of &#8220;human in the loop,&#8221; and I agreed before I even realized it.</p> <p class="">Then she said what I’d been waiting all day to hear. A model needs four things: talent, computing power, energy, and data. AI companies pay well for the first three, but they take the fourth—the writing—for free. That’s the real issue. Creative work used by these systems should only be used with permission and for a fee, just like electricity. The Times has licensed its archive to one company and is suing several others, and sees no problem with that: use the tools, but set the terms. In a world she expects to be filled with artificial content, the most valuable thing a newsroom can offer is the real thing, and she’s hired more staff than ever to do just that.</p> <p class=""><strong>The last word of the day came from one of the hosts. Vilas Dhar</strong>, who leads the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, closed by recalling the first Shared Futures, held a year earlier in Washington. At that event, concert pianist and AI music producer <a href="https://youtu.be/0J7nc0a4N4Y?si=lXy7uzgd-nxWqxff">AyşeDeniz Gökçin played Vivaldi</a> alongside a version generated by an AI model trained on the composer’s own music. Dhar called it a duet with the dead. What moved him wasn’t the technology itself, but every choice the pianist made about what to take from the system and what to leave out. She took the ghost the machine gave her and turned it into something human. The machine provided the notes, and the person made the music.</p> <p class="">When I arrived late at the Times Center, I thought I might ask if a machine could become an author. I didn’t get the chance, which turned out to be good because I realized it was the wrong question. I should have asked something older than the technology itself. It’s a question from a story in Jewish tradition I’ve been thinking about: the golem story, a creature of clay brought to life when a rabbi writes the Hebrew word for truth on a piece of parchment and places it in the creature&#8217;s mouth. The golem works tirelessly and asks for nothing, but it can’t be held accountable for its actions. Only the person who gave it life can. We can debate forever whether our golem can write when it’s clear that it can. But who is responsible for it? Who gives permission, who benefits, who signs their name, and who apologizes when it makes a mistake?</p> <p class="">Those are questions a machine can’t answer. Watching a room full of &#8220;creative doers,&#8221; as Will Oremus called them, insist in their own ways that they would keep making work on their own terms, I saw why the organizers were right about one thing: the artist is still in the room. A machine can now produce more words than any writer ever could, but it has less voice than any of them. A camera never stopped painters from seeing; it freed them to see differently. What neither machine can do is tell us what it feels like to be human from the inside. That’s still our job. I went back to my room and started writing, and those notes turned into something longer.</p> <details class="wp-block-details is-layout-flow wp-block-details-is-layout-flow"><summary>AI use</summary> <p class="">This article has been copyedited using Grammarly, which is an AI language tool.</p> </details> </div> <div class="wp-block-group is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained"> <p class="has-medium-variant"><strong>Related</strong></p> <div class="card-slider alignfull has-grid-spacing-small"> <div class="card-slider__content"> <div class="card"><div class="card__wrap"><figure class="card__media"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/farmer-and-phone-app-1.jpg" height="844" width="1500" style="object-position:50% 50%"/></figure><div class="card__text"><div class="card__header"><h3 class="card__heading"><span class="card__heading-text"><a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/what-ai-cant-reach-at-the-end-of-the-road/">What AI Can’t Reach at the End of the Road</a></span></h3></div><div class="card__content"><div class="card__content-inner"></div></div></div></div></div> <div class="card"><div class="card__wrap"><figure class="card__media"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/pope-and-the-clock-babel-1.webp" style="object-position:50% 50%"/></figure><div class="card__text"><div class="card__header"><h3 class="card__heading"><span class="card__heading-text"><a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/the-pope-and-the-clock/">The Pope and the Clock</a></span></h3></div><div class="card__content"><div class="card__content-inner"></div></div></div></div></div> <div class="card"><div class="card__wrap"><figure class="card__media"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" style="object-position: 50% 50%" src="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/People-in-the-Age-of-AI.jpg" height="1000" width="1500"/></figure><div class="card__text"><div class="card__header"><h3 class="card__heading"><span class="card__heading-text"><a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/what-kind-of-people-do-we-want-to-become-in-the-age-of-ai/">What Kind of People Do We Want to Become in the Age of AI?</a></span></h3></div><div class="card__content"><div class="card__content-inner"></div></div></div></div></div> </div> <div class="card-slider__nav"> <button type="button" class="card-slider__go card-slider__go--back" aria-label="Previous"> <svg class="svg svg--svg-assets-svg-icon-arrow-left" role="img" focusable="false" height="0" width="0"><use xlink:href="#svg-assets-svg-icon-arrow-left"/></svg> </button> <button type="button" class="card-slider__go card-slider__go--forward" aria-label="Next"> <svg class="svg svg--svg-assets-svg-icon-arrow-right" role="img" focusable="false" height="0" width="0"><use xlink:href="#svg-assets-svg-icon-arrow-right"/></svg> </button> </div> </div> </div> <p>The post <a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/the-artist-is-still-in-the-room/">The Artist Is Still in the Room</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org">Aspen Institute</a>.</p>