Can artists and AI coexist?

SHANTELL MARTIN: So something I learned from doing an early AI experiment back in 2015, 16 was that just like any tools, if the intention behind them is not correct or supportive of the artists, then the tools that you are using won’t be either.

RANA EL KALIOUBY: Shantell Martin is an artist, performer, and philosopher. Her work sits at the intersection of art and technology. And after nearly a decade of incorporating AI into her work, she’s learned some valuable lessons.

MARTIN: I think the more of us that ask ourselves how we are finding our way in life, the better kind of outcomes we have, because I’m finding my way in life through this language of words and lines and drawing and connecting. If you are finding your way in life through kind of like stealing and being egotistical, that doesn’t lead anywhere good. It doesn’t manifest good in your body, in your relationships, maybe in your bank account, but at the end of the day, like, why are we all here?

EL KALIOUBY: Shantell’s art often features bold, graphic line drawings. Her work has scaled gallery walls and has traced paths across Times Square. She’s collaborated with iconic brands like Tiffany & Co, as well as leading artists like Kendrick Lamar.

On this episode, Shantell and I talk about creative control in the age of AI, how AI can unlock new potential for artists, and why we need AI enabled solutions to protect artists’ IP.

I’m Rana el Kaliouby and this is Pioneers of AI – a podcast taking you behind-the-scenes of the AI revolution.

[THEME MUSIC]

Hi Chantel. Thank you for joining us on the show.

MARTIN: Thanks for having me.

Copy LinkHow curiosity and recognition shaped her artistic path

EL KALIOUBY: So first I wanna congratulate you for being honored with an MBE for your contribution to arts and charity. And for our listeners who are not familiar with what an MBE is, it’s member of the Order of the British Empire, and it’s a pretty big deal, right?

MARTIN: It sounds quite serious. It’s basically an award that you get now from King Charles ii, before it would’ve been Queen Elizabeth. And it’s something which in the UK and the Commonwealth is a serious deal. Not a lot of people get it. And for me, I’m very grateful and honored for this because I haven’t lived in the UK for 22 years. So to be recognized as an artist for the work that I’ve done with the arts and charity, for me that’s pretty amazing. People in America keep congratulating me on my MBA, and I have to keep telling them it’s not an MBA. You can buy an MBA, but you can’t buy an MBE. No.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. That’s amazing. Very cool. Congratulations. And then you and I share the MIT media Lab connection.

MARTIN: Yes, do.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. And you have this amazing mural that you did for the lab. What inspired you to do that mural, and also what was your experience like at the lab? I’ve always found the lab to be this like, very interesting playground for adults, right?

MARTIN: So I love my time there. So I was a visiting scholar at MIT Media Lab, I think for 2013, 14, and I was in a lab run by Sep Kamar called Social Computing. And essentially we were an odd ball group of people from different disciplines that came together to help build social systems that had benefit to the world.

So we were building Montessori schools, looking at different types of maps, looking at parks, and for me it was a really amazing time as an artist to be there and be surrounded by people with such obsessions from different kind of places and perspectives. I drew that mural at the lab and, after I drew it, I was like, I wonder how long the combined amount of line in this mural is.

And my friend next to me was like, Chantel, I can tell you. How high is the wall? How long is the wall? How thick is the pen that you used? And then she calculated, okay, the combined amount of line in that drawing is about 1,664 feet long.

And I was okay, thank you. So for me to be in a place like that where you can think out loud and there’s someone with perhaps the skills and the expertise to answer those questions, that was amazing.

Copy LinkWhy drawing becomes a language for philosophy and permission

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. I love that. So I wanna give our listeners kind of a little bit of an idea of the art you create. So how do you best describe your art and just bring it to life for us?

MARTIN: It depends who I’m speaking to, but in general, I just like to say I draw. I would mostly describe it as mostly black and white. Not always, but mostly black and white bold line work at different scales, and there’s a lot of space and it’s playful and whimsical, but sometimes in there there’s deep serious phrases.

EL KALIOUBY: Let’s take Shantell’s mural at the MIT Media Lab. It fully covers a huge wall. The wall is all white with black painted lines that could be .. a map? Or maybe a landscape of rolling hills? But some of the sections have faces, so perhaps the hills are bodies?

It’s fascinating to look at. And there are fragments of text – they’re familiar words, but somehow mysterious, like “this day .. one day .. some day .. we can.”.

MARTIN: And essentially, I like to say that I’m a philosopher before I’m an artist. So philosophers back in the day were people who thought about things, observed things, questioned things, and so that’s what I do. I observe things. I think about things for a long time. I question them. And then the byproduct of that is me kind of going out there in the world and creating these different projects that take different mediums and forms. And it could be the form of an installation or the form of a walking path, or the form of a collaboration or a product or a project. So I like to say I’m essentially someone that thinks about things, and I’m using drawing as a medium to bring that thinking into a place where we can all see it.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. Are there some recurring themes that you like to explore in your art?

MARTIN: The themes perhaps change as I change, but there’s an underlying theme and current of permission, interweaving permission within the work in places where people don’t need permission. But these things give benefit to people. So walking, drawing, breathing, talking, being still, doing nothing.

These are themes I like to incorporate within the work, and you don’t need permission to any of that. But by me creating it, that perhaps reinspires something within you.

EL KALIOUBY: I notice in a lot of your art you kind of incorporate lines and bold drawings, but also faces. And I’ve spent like 25 years of my career studying faces and how does the face express emotion in the world? Yours are very much line drawings of faces, but the eyes have like different gazes and I’d love to hear what inspires you to bring in kind of that human element into your art?

MARTIN: It is interesting ’cause when I look back at my work, I can see that there’s kind of characters or phrases or landscapes that are connected to people or places. And the faces are very interesting because I didn’t really draw faces in the way that I do today until I moved to America. So they’re very much just like an American chapter within this body of my work.

And before then, before moving to America, I lived in Japan and the faces or characters that I drew were kind of more formed, had bodies, more detailed. And then when I moved to America, they kind of became much lighter and less. And a lot of the faces that I draw today is just four lines, nose, mouth, eye. And I think it’s really fascinating that with just four lines, you can create such expression, such personality. To answer your question, I think the faces I do today are very tied to this American chapter, so if I perhaps leave America, maybe they will disappear or turn into something else.

I am also always fascinated by how four lines have such expression. And once someone pointed out, Chantel, why are your faces always pointing left? And I was like, oh, they don’t. And then I look back at this big mural that I did at the time, I’m like, oh, they are all facing left. And I think it’s because they’re facing me as I draw. When I draw those eyes, they’re looking at me. And so there’s that sense of they’re keeping their tabs on me. Are you being real? Are you being true? Are you being you? And then there’s that occasional conversation where they’re not looking at me, they’re looking at each other, and they’re kind of perhaps discussing all sorts of different themes.

Copy LinkHow art begins as agency and self-discovery

EL KALIOUBY: That’s amazing. So fascinating. I would love to hear more about your journey. You said you grew up in a very different world than the one you are in today. So tell us a little bit about your journey becoming an artist.

MARTIN: Yeah, so where does that start? I think we all start as artists. I love to ask people when I do conferences or talks, if you can draw, put your hand up. And it’s always amazing, even in a creative environment, people are very hesitant to put their hand up. And it’s like, how can you not do something as an adult that you did naturally as a 2, 3, 4, 5-year-old?

We’re all born as artists because it’s a way that helps us. That natural young artist is able to collaborate with the world. It calibrates themselves with the world. It’s a way that they can extract and connect their head to their heart, to their hand, to the outside world. And there’s so many benefits to drawing and line making.

And so we’re all given this gift as children to be artists. Not all of us need to do it within our careers professionally, but I think we’re all born that way for a reason. And then over time, your teacher or your parent says that’s not how you do it and that’s not how you do it, or is that this?

And then they think, no, it’s not that. And then you start to believe that you can’t and someone else can. And I think for myself, I never got to that phase where I’m like, oh, I can’t. I’ve definitely had those moments later in life, but for the most part early on, I drew because it was a mechanism that allowed me to be okay with the world that I was in that I didn’t have control over.

I think sometimes as a young person, if you don’t have control over your environment, you can draw and those drawings or words or things that you imagine give you agency over yourself and your environment. And so that’s kind of how I started in my earlier age. And also, being different, I didn’t look like anyone that I grew up around.

I grew up in a very kind of white working class counselor state in London. And no one was like really brown with an Afro like me. So already I looked very different. And so drawing was this place where I’m like, well, I can be me here and figure out me.

And that eventually led me to art school and that was amazing ’cause you get to art school and actually difference is celebrated. And then that one path led to another and eventually I moved to Japan and then America. All along the way, I was always drawing, always writing. Never knew at that time. Even today, I think it’s bizarre that I’m an artist.

EL KALIOUBY: Why is it bizarre?

MARTIN: Because I never imagined this path for myself. And I think sometimes when you’re putting one foot in front of the other, you can only see right in front of you. It is like when I’m drawing a mural, I’m just seeing the one line in front of me. And it’s only when you step back and reflect that you see the bigger picture.

And I think the way that I’ve led my life is by putting that one foot in front of the other, only really seeing that one line in front of me, not knowing that when you step back, you are an artist. You are just saying, hey, I wanna say yes to yes and no to no, and I’m gonna do what it takes to survive to get to this next line, this next foot, this next kind of path. But you don’t know what that path looks like until you have that moment to reflect and it’s the same today. I dunno what the next five, 10 years look like for me. Yes, I’m an artist, but what does that really mean to me? What do I wanna make? What do I wanna create? What do I have the freedom to do as an artist now?

EL KALIOUBY: Shantell’s work is rooted in the physical world. But technology has pretty much always been an important layer to her art. We’ll get to how after a short break. Stay with us.

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Copy LinkUsing technology to expand drawing into live experience

EL KALIOUBY: So you’ve always been at the forefront of technology and art. And we’re gonna dive specifically into AI, but before we do that, you were a video jockey in Japan way back when, people didn’t really understand what that was. You did a collaboration with Google. I wanna hear more about these experiences and how do you see technology’s role in your artistry?

MARTIN: It is interesting. I’ve always been naturally inclined to explore technology. As a kid, I’m someone taking my NES apart with screwdrivers and like looking at all the pieces and pulling it back together and, being younger, growing up in London, kind of then going to drum and bass raves and being in awe about the sound systems. And then when I moved to Japan, I became a visual jockey, as you mentioned, and a visual jockey in the sense that you are creating the visuals for the space. A disc jockey, a DJ is creating the music. A visual jockey is creating the visuals. And in the early two thousands, living in Japan.

I got very interested in how I can take drawing and use technology as a medium for visuals in clubs and avant-garde spaces and through kind of natural collaborations. I would be working with Circuit Benders, people who were making their own instruments. I’d be working with people who coded and made music that was static. I would be drawing and using mixers and software to create layers and kind of fading in between and layering DVDs with my drawing. And for me it was just kind of a natural way of exploring drawing as a medium, but having technology kind of layer it and add to it and kind of give it motion and movement.

I’d be drawing live. So I’d be on a Wacom tablet. And actually I was one of the first people to Alpha test the Bluetooth Wacom tablets in a nightclub in Japan. So I’d be drawing into software like Sketchbook Pro or Photoshop or something like that. And that drawing is influenced and kind of persuaded by the audience and the people in that room.

EL KALIOUBY: Amazing. So let’s talk about how AI specifically can amplify art. There’s a lot of concern around how AI can be a threat to artists, and we’ll get to that in a minute. But I also see a lot of potential in how artists can harness AI to, for example, bring this interactive element and whatnot. How do you think about the role AI can play in art in general, but also your artwork?

MARTIN: Yeah. I think with AI, it’s definitely an addition to a toolkit. It’s a tool.

I think where we start to get into tricky waters is what’s the fine print behind that toolkit? What’s the intention behind that toolkit? But I think there is so much potential there. But we need to make sure what’s behind the hood is transparent, accountable, responsible, ethical, and all of those things.

Copy LinkWhy intention matters as much as the AI tool itself

EL KALIOUBY: I wanna double click on your use of the word intention. Because I think that’s a very interesting framing for how to use AI, not just in art, but in general. What do you mean by that? And maybe you can give us an example of how that intention can matter and be in alignment or misalignment.

MARTIN: Yeah, so when I draw, I love when I create these large drawings, they feel good. It doesn’t feel like they were forced. It doesn’t feel like they were coerced. It just feels like it was meant to be. And I think it feels like that because there was good intention behind the creation.

And so intention is almost like the glue or the fabric that makes something work. And if that glue is good, the work is good. If that glue is a little bit icky and a little bit misguided, then what comes out is gonna be a little bit icky and a little bit misguided. If that intention is about greed and ego, then the product of that is gonna be reflective of that. And so I think the intention is almost like those kind of emotional directives that have been put into the fabric of the product, the tool, the platform, the company, et cetera.

EL KALIOUBY: That’s like fascinating. I love that visual. That’s gonna be one of my takeaways from this interview for sure.

Yeah, so I wanna kind of anchor some of that conversation in the project you referenced where I think this was about a few years ago where you trained a model on your art. Tell us more about why you embarked on this project. What was the outcome? And I know that there were disagreements at the end, so just walk us through that story.

MARTIN: Yeah, so a few years ago, I think 2012, 13, kind of very early on.

EL KALIOUBY: Very early on in the AI kind of arc.

MARTIN: Yeah. So I was very interested in this idea of, as an artist, most of my drawings start with a skeleton. They start with a DNA, and this DNA is the structure of the drawing. And I was very curious, for example, is there an underlying blueprint that I am fulfilling as an artist that is unspoken to me? And so, 2015, 16, I met a couple of people who were at MIT at the time, and they were like, well, we can train a model, we can deep learn a model on your art. Essentially what I did is I drew, I think 400 different DNAs. And then over a period of time, every day I filled in a random one. And after we had those drawings, my collaborators would manually trace the different elements to be like, this is a face, this is a landscape, this is a phrase. And then we created some new DNAs outside of that set and had a robot arm with this trained model fill in the blanks. The idea that this would all work towards a show, we’re gonna have a show at a gallery in Boston. But then I find out that my collaborators are using this robot arm to do drawings, using the output on t-shirts and canvases and other things. And I’m like, wait, what are you doing? Like, that’s not a part of the show. What are you doing that for? And the response I got was, well, we only output because we trained the model. And I’m like, what? Like, that—

EL KALIOUBY: The data, the input data is yours, right? It’s your right.

MARTIN: The output is a derivative of the input, but at that time in 2016, no one really kind of had a precedent or AI wasn’t really a big word then. And so my collaborators went to the Berkman Center, the cyber law clinic at Harvard, and got two lawyers on their side to try to come after me to say that now they own the output because they trained the model.

And so this was such a blindside for me ’cause I’d been someone that had been collaborating for over 20 years and had never come across any individual or collaborator with such ego in the sense that, okay, well we did this, now we own this because we want to set some name for ourselves. And it’s such an icky way to do it. So this is where that kind of descriptor comes from earlier of like the intentions of the people or the intentions of the tools and those intentions being transparent or ethical or accountable.

And essentially in the end we ended up getting a license to say that I owned all the inputs, so therefore I owned the outputs and it was derivative, but just that couple of years where someone was almost taking your livelihood, instead of being a good collaborator and seeing how far collectively can we take this. So this distilled in me this idea that if, as an artist, you are gonna use any platform, any tool with AI and you are using your livelihood, your IP, your artwork, your identity as a training model, you need to be very clear of the intentions of the people, the platform that you’re working with, and make sure that those are transparent and accountable and visible. Because there are a lot of bad actors out there who unfortunately are just trying to get ahead to set a name for themselves, get a job in a private sector, et cetera.

Copy LinkWhat AI image generators reveal about attribution and consent

EL KALIOUBY: You referenced this story and it’s almost a decade ago, and in a very interesting way, the same issues around attribution still exist. So I wanna kind of dive into some of this. I’d love to get your thoughts on open AI’s image generator. Users are able to generate images in specific art styles like Studio Ghibli, for example.

And that created a lot of controversy online. Some people thought it was no big deal and a lot of other people felt like it really did plagiarize these artists’ works. What are your thoughts on that?

MARTIN: My thoughts on that come back again to intention — that seems to be the theme of this. But when you look at OpenAI’s intentions beforehand, it’s like when Facebook built these tools and then later you find out that all of your data’s been stolen or you’ve basically given it away and you were never given the opportunity to opt out. But they could have built it from the beginning and built in kind of responsible mechanisms. And I think it’s the same with OpenAI. When we started to use this technology, we forgot the rules that already existed. We’ve forgotten that when you go through academia, any kind of paper or book or thesis that you write, you have footnotes and you give attribution and you credit your sources. And suddenly we’ve forgotten systems like Creative Commons where you can give attributions with commercial rights or not commercial rights and you can get credit. And so in the real world, just kind of like the example I used, when I was at MIT, we were essentially, if you take that to a physical standpoint, cutting up my drawing, photocopying it, and then replacing it in a different form. And if that was a physical thing on paper, you just call it a derivative, but now you are using technology, so we don’t know what it is anymore. And it’s the same with this. You are taking work, so there should be attribution, there should be credit. We have things like creative license, there’s the technology out there to have fractional attributions or credit, and these are things that could have been built in from the beginning, from the bottom, so that we build up a kind of a reflex to understand that these things are just a part of the system.

So OpenAI could have built these things from the ground up with attribution, with creative commons licenses, with a way to credit sources, with a way to acknowledge that. And so I think that’s where the flaw is because there wasn’t the right intention there from the beginning to protect, to credit, to attribute. The intention was to build fast, to make money, to expand, to acquire other companies. That was the intention. So I think it’s hard now to work backwards because we’ve built these machines that didn’t have those mechanisms built in to credit, to attribute, to credit the sources.

And for some reason we’ve just pretended that those mechanisms didn’t exist in the real world. So I think that’s the issue — now we’re left with kind of the messy results or the aftermath, instead of building a muscle over time where it’s just normal that these tools we use have credits and sources and attribution built into them.

EL KALIOUBY: These kinds of attributions aren’t built into a lot of the mainstream consumer-facing models out there. But Shantell is trying to build a platform that’s different – one that supports artists and puts them in control of their work. That, and more, after a short break.

[AD BREAK]

Open AI, Midjourney and other generative AI companies are facing blowback from artists – who say their work is being used to train these models. And for an AI-caused problem, Shantell is seeking an AI-enabled solution.

Copy LinkBuilding artist-first AI systems that protect ownership

Now you are building an AI generated platform that could also be a solution to this problem, and it’s specifically focused on AI generated art that puts the artist in control. Tell us more about this platform.

MARTIN: So I’ve obviously been thinking a lot about generative work for a long time, but also a way where we can create tools and platforms where the artist has clear ownership of the work where it’s kind of living in its own ecosystem. And so I’ve been working on a project called Legacy where artists, especially artists that have a recognizable style and a large body and data set of work, can use Legacy — basically as a cataloging and database system, but also as a way to create new derivatives and additions of their work. So the first phase is that it takes in a data set of work, catalogs it, archives it. Perhaps that’s in chronological order, perhaps an artist might catalog their work in a different way. It could be line thickness, it could be density, it could be color, it could be something else. But there’s a cataloging system of the work. And then from that, using prompt engineering, you are able to create new works and derivatives from the work. My example, I might say, create a new work with these dimensions, with this line thickness, and five faces, a landscape and a positive phrase. And then it will create that work, and then that could be licensed and painted on a wall or go into a hotel, monitor screens, et cetera. But the idea is that no one’s training from it, no one’s taking from it, and you are very clear that you own this and no one’s gonna pop out of the blue and say, okay, now I own it. But that’s basically the benchmark of it.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. You’re also looking at artists’ wills and testaments, to make sure that the surviving family can release the art that is in line with the artist’s wishes. Is that also part of Legacy and how big of a problem is that?

MARTIN: So it’s a huge problem. So basically, artists, especially artists that make physical work, that work when an artist passes becomes sometimes, very rarely an asset, but mostly a burden to a family, because now it’s like, well, what do I do with all of this work? And there are so many stories out there of daughters, sons, cousins, nephews, nieces that inherit this work.

And storage is very expensive. Having the work organized or cataloged, if it hasn’t been, is very expensive. Artists kind of naively think, oh, I’ll just leave my work to a museum, or I’ll just leave it to my family. And then they have — most artists don’t have a will, but even if they do have a will, they don’t realize that you can be caught up in kind of arbitration court or the court that basically has to go through the will and everything.

You could be caught in that sort of court for a year and a half, two years. And during that time, who’s paying for everything? So it’s about making sure artists have their will, have an executor, set up a trust, have the right chain of command. Perhaps you are having life insurance so that when you pass, you have an executor that knows what they can do with that life insurance money. And mostly that might be going to pay for storage or for cataloging or for archiving. So it’s a huge issue. When artists pass, like, what happens to their IP, their licensing? If they’re an artist that has a lot of digital work, then that digital work has IP and licensing attached to it.

And so essentially Legacy initially is that checklist — do you have a will? Do you have an executor? Do you have a health proxy? Do you have life insurance? What are the bare minimum of things that you need? And then eventually we’ll create partnerships where we can start to provide those. And AI is making that a much easier task because each state has different laws. And then if you are an artist that has property even overseas, that’s a whole other different kind of ball game, but with AI, we’re able to easily correlate, okay, you live in New York, but your work’s here.

Or we need — we don’t now need an estate attorney in every single street in America. You just need to kind of have that knowledge within the AI. And then you have a couple of key attorneys here and there to do the paperwork. Also, I did my estate planning like 15 years ago, but within that time, there’ve been moves, there’ve been breakups. I’ve put my stuff in storage somewhere. And not once have I had an email to update my will, to update this, to update that. And so—

EL KALIOUBY: AI can help you be proactive, right. And stay on top of it.

MARTIN: It can. It can check in with you like, hey, have you had a move, have you had a breakup? Have you had this, how’s your health? So it can basically be proactive and keep tabs on you so that 10 years don’t pass and that watch that you left to someone or that artwork you left to someone has been sold but never got updated. So it’s definitely with technology that will make Legacy a lot easier to run in those different ways.

Copy LinkHow AI could help design healthier spaces and futures

EL KALIOUBY: So let’s talk about the future of AI and creativity. What are some of the areas of AI and art that excite you? And I’ve heard you talk about the intersection of AI and architecture, and I hadn’t actually heard that before. So I’d love for us to spend a few minutes digging into that — how do you see the role of AI as it comes to building these amazing spaces?

MARTIN: Well, if we think about the role of humanity, we know that walking helps, breathing helps, meditating helps, drawing helps, standing still helps.

We know that there are these aspects that are tools that we could bring into our life that make it better, but we don’t do it.

And I think it’s the same with things like architecture. You walk into any hospital, it’s not built in a way that encourages health. You walk into any office building, it’s not built in a way that encourages health. So architects have such a huge responsibility, but they don’t use it.

And we don’t hold them accountable because they’re basically building for a bottom line to squeeze in the smallest apartments that they can. They’ve got a contract for a hospital and it’s not in their interest to build it and think about light and space and air and all the things that you would need if you’re trying to heal naturally or heal with the most benefit that you can get.

With things like AI, we can use that to say, okay, how can we build this affordably, sustainably, but with the most maximum benefit to health. It could be a school, it could be a healthcare facility, it could be an old people’s home. How do we make sure we optimize light? Optimize sunlight, optimize it for heat, optimize it for corners, optimize it for all the things that we need a building to be, but still tick those boxes that developers and real estate people need to, which is probably cheaper.

But let’s find those materials and all of those things that we need using technology to then design these buildings that perhaps don’t look like they do today, but they encourage health, wellness, mental health and all of those things.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah, so cool. I love that space. I think there’s a lot of potential here. What are you working on next?

MARTIN: I have a museum show coming up in 2026 at Grounds for Sculpture, which is a museum in New Jersey. It’s 40 acres of kind of inside, outside sculptural space. So that’s coming up in the fall of 2026. I have a new bike coming out with Brompton bikes.

It’s my second bike with them. So that’s coming out at the end of this year. And then I’ve been working on Playne. P-L-A-Y-N-E. And Playne is an education company that creates curriculum and activities for afterschool programs. So we’ve been doing a few pilot programs in summer camps and stuff like that this year, and we’ll be rolling that out next year. So that’s a few things that I’ve been working on.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah, very varied and I love it.

Alright. Last question. I always ask all my guests the same question on the show. What do you think it means to be human in the age of AI?

MARTIN: Connection. I think human just means connection and in the age of AI and all the other things that come before that, social media and the internet, et cetera, connection and community is more important than anything.

EL KALIOUBY: That was so inspiring. Where can people find you?

MARTIN: So you can take a listen to my podcast, what’s the point? And that’s everywhere where podcasts stream, and I’m speaking to different artists about kind of the existential questions of why we’re artists. And just the normal places, Chantel underscore Martin on most social media networks.

EL KALIOUBY: Chantel, thank you for joining us today. This was great.

MARTIN: Thanks so much for having me. I’ve had so much fun.

EL KALIOUBY: When it comes to AI, everything is moving so quickly. There’s always something new to test out! But I love Shantell’s reminder about the importance of intention – how she described it as the glue that makes something work.

The why and the how behind her work is as important as the final product. And you don’t need to be an artist to embody that value.

If you’re an entrepreneur, what motivates your work? What’s YOUR why? And how can you ensure that your company has a positive impact on the people around you? If you’re an avid user of AI, how can you engage with this technology thoughtfully and safely?

With intention, follows real action. And like Shantell, I strongly agree that having the right mindset truly does shape the way we move through the world – in all of our endeavors.

Like what you heard on this Pioneers of AI episode? Let us know, by rating us and leaving a review wherever you are listening now. Your feedback means so much to us. Thanks!