Nadja Spiegelman

Emily, I'd love to know your thoughts.

I mean, I'm so interested in this question of can AI create good art?

But I think part of that question gets to how do we define art?

My dad is an artist, and when I was like seven years old and he was about to go into the dentist chair, I asked him what art is.

And he always asks for laughing gas at the dentist and says that this is a really good time for him to think.

So he was like, hold that thought, and then got a lot of laughing gas and then came out and was like...

I know the answer to this question.

And the answer he gave me then, and it's been really useful for me my whole life, is that art is the means through which we gave shape to our thoughts and feelings.

And it's very much a definition that comes from a perspective of the artist.

But I think for even as a consumer of art, part of the joy of it is feeling like we have connected with someone else's experience of the world or we have connected with someone else's emotions.

And I think that AI just can't do that.

Emily, I'm so curious about your thoughts on this because I love that you want to defend that AI can create art.

I think it's so interesting.

Can we also talk about just the aesthetics of what it is that AI creates?

Because I think that that is changing rapidly as it gets better and better at making things that look exactly like the kind of art we create.

But in the past year, we call AI slop, but what we think of when we think of AI-generated imagery is actually something that's like really slick and perfect and is sort of also akin to Trump's tackiness.

I think there's a reason why he loves sharing this kind of video.

I'm curious if either of you think that AI itself has its own aesthetic, how you would describe it and where that aesthetic comes from.

Yeah, I think it's really, it's true that it is cycling through different trends the way art always has, that it's moved from slick to looking more analog, and that it could only have a true aesthetic if it's guided by a human's sense of aesthetic and position and meaning.

I'm seeing a lot of people say, just talking, thinking about the return to sort of like a graininess and analog they are both talking about, that 2026 in reaction to the creation of AI imagery is going to be the year of analog, that