Theme

Doug Shapiro breaks down how every anxiety roiling the media business right now is a lagging indicator of a disruption that started fifty years ago, when digitization made distribution abundant and cheap. Now the same thing is happening to creation itself. Generative AI adds a layer of meaning on top of the digital layer, and just as the internet collapsed the cost of moving content, this collapses the cost of making it. Finite attention is about to meet infinite supply – one of the themes guiding our LA Summit.

Signal

The dominant narrative says AI is about doing the same thing for less, but history tells us that's the boring part. Every new medium begins by imitating the old one until creatives discover what only the new medium can do. The killer app of generative AI won't be cheaper content, but new formats - participatory media, emergent storytelling, adaptive worlds, and experiences we don't have names for yet.

Session

Doug Shapiro's session from the Artist and the Machine Summit in New York offers a map of this shift. He traces the collapsing cost of distribution to six tectonic trends, then asks what happens when creation follows - pricing converges on free, quality gets redefined, and the future belongs to the “Neumorphs,” using AI to make media better, not just cheaper. His closing line doubles as our thesis for December, “The people in this room hold the fate of the media business in their hands.”

Summit

This December in LA, we're bringing together those shaping AI in Hollywood, immersive entertainment, gaming, music, and physical AI. The focus is on what creatives are doing with AI now - the big bets leaders are taking, new models and tools, and how creativity itself is evolving alongside tech. We'll also take on the questions moving through culture, from smart venues and creator business models to policy, legal frameworks, and the rise of mobile-first content. Programming details coming soon.

Pulse

• China Has the World Hooked on Two-Minute Microdramas: Bloomberg reports on how the bite-sized shows are now an $11 billion industry, attracting growing interest from major studios.

• Cloudflare Launches Kitesurf, a Browser Built For AI agents: TechCrunch details how with Kitesurf, AI developers will be able to build software that can navigate websites, fill out forms, and complete other browser-based tasks, without having to build their own browser software.

• A New Tool Aimed at Solving Synthetic Filmmaking Is Being Unwrapped at Autodesk: The Hollywood Reporter covers that one of the Hollywood’s preferred AI studios is launching a set of tools it says can give directors a new level of control over shots in AI.

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com.

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx

Theme

Most AI creativity conversations still get stuck nitpicking the final product. The song, the image, the film, the post. Did a human make it? Is it good? Is the artistic merit still intact? But the more interesting and consequential shift comes into play before anything is finalized. We circled this topic in a conversation with Taryn Southern, Wes Hopkins, and King Willonius that uncovered a more nuanced look at where behavioral shifts are most affected as tools progress.

AI is changing the rehearsal space of creativity, the messy, private, half-formed zone where artists test an instinct before it becomes a project, a pitch, a scene, a show, or a world. So much creative work dies before it becomes material to the world because the cost of the first version is too high. You need a crew, a budget, a storyboard artist, a technical collaborator, or enough confidence to ask someone else to believe in a thing you can barely explain. AI changes that first proof point. Creators can move faster from instinct to evidence, from a thing in their head to a thing they can share, and we believe we are all better off for it.

Signal

The next creative advantage will belong to people who can prototype taste that evolves as fast as the world around us. Not simply to produce more for the sake of it, but feel through a malleable idea before it solidifies.

That is the value of tools like Adobe Firefly that give artists and brands a place to rehearse with their material. This is where AI becomes more interesting than automation. It gives creators a way to stay in conversation with their own instincts. The output still matters, and it always will, but the deeper, more structural change is in the conversation evoked on the way to delivering the final product. The faster an artist can see, reject, revise, and share an idea, the more ambitious the idea can become. The real creative shift is making the earliest version brave enough to survive.

Pulse

• Generative AI could boost creativity, but only for some workers: Fast Company reports that generative AI boosts creativity primarily for workers with strong metacognitive skills, who can identify gaps, assess their approach, and refine prompts rather than use the tools passively.

• OpenAI reduces prices on GPT-5.6 models by up to 80%: The changes aim to stretch enterprise AI budgets as spending comes under greater scrutiny and lower-cost competitors gain ground.

• Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots: Google DeepMind’s new robotics models enable robots to plan and execute longer, multi-step tasks, coordinate with other robots, adapt quickly to new hardware, and operate with greater whole-body control and dexterity.

Early access is live for the Artist and the Machine Summit in LA this December, and spots are going quick. Your chance to be among the first:

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com.

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx

With Don Allen Stevenson III and Viktoria Modesta

Theme

The internet is filling up with bodies no one lives in. Generated faces front ad campaigns, avatar models walk digital runways, and this month a major platform let anyone conjure images from a stranger's photos with a mention. The conversation everyone is circling, sometimes without naming it, is no longer whether AI can render a convincing human. It clearly can. The question is what happens to identity, authorship, and the body itself when "a person" becomes something you can generate.

Signal

Look closely at recent news and a pattern emerges - the industry is scrambling to re-anchor generated media to real humans. Meta pulled an Instagram AI feature days after launch because it treated people's photos, their faces and bodies, as raw generative material without consent. When synthetic bodies and voices become infinite, the scarce asset is the lived one, the body with a history and a stake in the outcome. The frontier question is shifting from what can we generate to what does embodiment mean when generation is free? And the people with the most interesting answers may just be the artists who have been designing their own for years.

Conversation

Before the future is built, it must be imagined. In a deeper dive at our New York Summit, Viktoria Modesta and Don Allen Stevenson III explore embodiment, identity, design, and the uncharted space between generated bodies and lived experience.

Modesta, an artist and researcher working at the limits of human augmentation, from prosthetics-as-fashion to body design for microgravity, pushes back on the dominant transhumanist script of leaving the body behind. Her counter-proposal is multidimensional: fold in medical advancement, ancient tradition, and reality-based imagination. The conversation explores embodied cognition, the understanding that intelligence is not seated in the head but distributed through the whole body — a useful corrective in a moment obsessed with disembodied minds.

LA Summit

As conversations are accelerating, the next room is taking shape, with even more in store. This December, Artist and the Machine returns to Los Angeles, bringing together the people building the future of art, technology, media, design, film, music, and culture. Early bird tickets are now live, details on our new Studio Day coming soon, but of course you get the sneak peek first.

Pulse

• Music Gets an AI Label: The RIAA, IFPI, the Grammys, and the major streamers launch voluntary "AI-generated" and "AI-assisted" tags, making human authorship visible infrastructure.

• Meta Backs Off Your Likeness: TechCrunch reports Meta killed its Instagram Muse @-mention feature days after launch, after users and CAA objected to photos becoming generative source material without consent.

• Microdramas That Talk Back: Character.AI's new (c.ai) series lets viewers chat with the cast of its studio-made vertical shows, blurring watching a character and living alongside one.

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com.

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx

Theme

At Cannes Lions, the AI conversation moved well past broad pro or anti AI arguments and into the nuanced questions around implementation. Google DeepMind announced a partnership with A24. Demis Hassabis pointed to taste, design sensitivity, original thinking, and cross-disciplinary synthesis as the skills that matter as systems get stronger. But on the ground, the more revealing insight was how unfinished the practice still feels. There is no Susan Kare of AI yet. No interface, visual grammar, or creative operating model has made the technology feel inevitable to normal people. Voice-only is too narrow. Dashboards are too much. The best use cases are still fighting through the shape of the tools.

Signal

That gap showed up everywhere. Cannes is still highly commercial, and much of the AI conversation defaulted to workflow, scale, compliance, and go-to-market. The conversations that stood out, however, kept landing on the same point, that the biggest drag on AI may be cultural. Generic output now has a shelf life measured in days. The “too perfect” AI look gets recognized quickly, and audiences are already developing antibodies to it. The creators pulling ahead are not creating content faucets. They are sketching first, photographing first, training models on their own work, building from real assets, and using AI as an adaptive tool around a point of view that no one else can access.

The advantage is moving to people and teams with taste, memory, restraint, and a willingness to design systems around judgment. Cannes made clear that the next phase of AI and Creativity will not be won by the teams producing the most, but shaped by the ones who can make the work feel specific, embodied, culturally aware, real, and worth paying attention to.

At our Cannes Lions brunch “The Rise of the New Creative Technologist”, presented with Adobe and featuring Aaron Mitchell Finegold, Val Carlson, and Paige Piskin, unpacked the role now responsible for translating craft, taste, brand intent, and abstract human direction into workflows AI can actually execute. The answer they circled was practical rather than abstract. The teams pulling ahead are learning to put creative judgment inside the system, then keep a human close enough to know what is worth bringing into the world.

LA Summit

The next room is taking shape, this time with the addition of a whole new day of programming. This December, Artist and the Machine returns in Los Angeles, bringing together the people building the future of AI and Creativity across art, technology, media, design, film, music, and culture. Early bird tickets are now live, and announcing our first-ever Summit Day 2 soon!

Pulse

• Humans Are Still in Charge: Time reports on what leaders at Cannes Lions are saying about creativity in the age of AI.

• Google invests in A24 to build AI movie tools: The Verse notes that the AI ‘research partnership’ aims to bridge the gap ‘between cutting-edge technology and next generation entertainment.’

• Are you having fun yet? Dataland, an intense new AI art museum: The Economic covers how Refik Anadol’s new project takes visitors senses by storm.

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com.

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx

Theme

Some of the most interesting AI work is happening when creators crack open the understanding of software and treat it as a medium to think through. Don Allen Stevenson III and Ceej Vega have been two of the clearest examples of this shift, using new tools to move from instinct to image, character, world, and interaction without waiting for the traditional production chain to catch up. This goes beyond efficiency, shipping faster, and leaning out necessary resources. Put in the right hands, it offers creative people a working surface for ideas that used to stay trapped in decks, sketches, and notes.

Signal

This shift made Replit’s Vibe Creation Showcase feel especially relevant in the Human Lounge at our AI & Creativity Summit in NY. When artists, designers, filmmakers, and founders can build a working prototype themselves, the earliest version of an idea becomes much more alive. You can test the mechanics, feel the interface, watch where people get confused, and find the parts that have charge. This changes the creative process from explaining the thing to encountering it. The concept becomes something people can click, break, share, remix, and respond to. For creative work, that is a meaningful shift. The prototype is no longer just a step toward production. It becomes part of how the idea discovers itself.

Podcast

In this Artist and the Machine podcast episode, guests Ceej Vega and Don Allen Stevenson III get into AI as a new creative stack, from Ceej’s entrance to creativity through Tumblr to explaining AI in NBA terms, and building full production worlds with voice, agents, Blender, and taste.

Paris

A few days ago in Paris, the ideas explored above became more tactical at CRAFTED, an intimate 200-person gathering by Benjamin Benichou supported by Artist and the Machine. Across two sessions, Sybille de Saint Louvent and Bastien Baumann showed how AI can relieve production pressure without replacing story, restraint, craft, or the human magic that bring ideas to life. We left feeling all the more inspired to continue exploring the frontier of what happens when artist and machine converge.

Pulse

• Interested in joining the Artist and the Machine team? We are hiring for two roles: A Summit Producer and Designer.

• AI Startup Midjourney Pivots to Health With Ultrasound Machine.

• 87% of Creators Say Creative AI Is Growing Their Business and Audience According to Adobe’s 2026 Creators’ Toolkit Report.

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com.

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx

Theme

For years, the dominant story of AI has been one of disembodiment. Intelligence compressed into prompts, images, avatars, agents, and synthetic media that appear to come from nowhere and belong to no one. But the frontier is physical. As machines learn to generate human likeness, simulate presence, interpret environments, and move through the world, the body returns as the place where these systems become meaningful, uncomfortable, political, intimate, and lived. This week’s session highlights look at embodiment from both directions - the human body extended through technology, performance, and necessity, and machine intelligence beginning to acquire a physical form of its own.

Signal

At our AI & Creativity Summit, Viktoria Modesta pushed beyond the usual conversation about AI aesthetics and into the deeper question of what makes a generated future worth inhabiting. Drawing from her work across prosthetics, performance, engineering, and microgravity, Modesta reframed the body as an active site of invention, not a limitation to be optimized away.

Paired with a conversation featuring frog and Archetype AI on embodied AI, physical form, and the assumptions being embedded before these systems reach daily life, the thread becomes clear. The future of AI will be shaped not only by what machines can produce, but by how they enter human space, identity, and experience.

Pulse

• Why AI May Be the Best Thing to Happen to Creativity in Decades: Inc covers why AI may be widening access to creativity rather than eroding it, lowering the gates around who gets to make ambitious work.

• AI is replacing creativity with ‘average’: Fast Company makes the case that when AI makes the average answer easier to reach, originality depends on the slower human work of friction, lived experience, and a point of view that doesn’t sound like everyone else.

• Introducing the Artist and the Machine podcast: Episodes are rolling out soon on our YouTube. Subscribe for a first look at longer, deeper, more candid exchanges with the leaders shaping the frontlines of AI and Creativity.

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com.

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx

Theme

The next era of AI and Creativity is being shaped in rooms where major institutions, emerging platforms, artists, technologists, and creative leaders are already in conversation. At Summit, attendees heard how NASA is bringing one of the world’s most trusted brand into the generative era before the session went live on Bloomberg. In Paris, Artist and the Machine joins CRAFTED as a Supporting Partner, giving our community priority access to a highly curated gathering around AI and craft. This is where the ideas start, not where they stay. Read on for a first look at concepts that have yet to hit the mainstream.

Signal

Artist and the Machine on Bloomberg

Bloomberg’s Christina Ruffini sat down with NASA's David Rager to discuss how his role as creative director is central to how one of the world’s most trusted institutions communicates discovery, science, and imagination.

Founder and CEO of OpenArt Coco Mao joined Kristen Bender of Universal Music Group, Chris Neff of Anomaly, and creator Paige Piskin for a Main Stage conversation on the creatives and platform builders defining the edge of technology and culture. The session looks at how new creative formats take shape, why cultural instinct matters as much as technical capability, and how tools like OpenArt are becoming part of the infrastructure for what gets made next.

Events

In true Artist and the Machine fashion, for Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity we’ll be leaning into the intimate and the intentional, hosting two carefully curated moments in conversation with partners and friends, covering the Rise of the New Creative Technologist, and The Imagination Age. Reply if you'll be there and would like to join us ✨ 

Over June 17 and 18 in New York, Replit is bringing vibe coding further into culture with vibecon, its first creative conference in New York this June. The event gathers artists, filmmakers, designers, founders, technologists, and curious newcomers around the simple premise that code is becoming a creative medium. It is a fitting signal for where this space is heading, as software creation moves out of purely technical teams and into the hands of creators.

Pulse

• OpenArt is offering a $240 trial subscription with generous credits: to the Artist and The Machine community. You can request a trial via the link above.

• Artist and the Machine joins as a Supporting Partner: Of Benjamin Benichou’s invite-only event in Paris on the future of AI and craft, on the evening of June 19th. Artist and the Machine community will be prioritized if you request to join.

• Suno Reveals $400 Million Funding Round at $5.4 Billion Valuation: The Hollywood Reporter covers that the round, led by OpenAI investor Bond Capital, comes just six months after a $250 million funding round had valued the company at $2.45 billion.

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com.

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx

Bloomberg’s Everybody’s Business segment recorded at the AI & Creativity Summit in NY

Theme

For everyone who joined us in New York, you know this was not exactly a one track, sit-in-your-seat-all-day kind of event. At any given moment, there were more than a dozen sessions, lounges, demos, workshops, conversations, and side quests unfolding across our AI & Creativity Summit. So in line with our event format, this special edition newsletter presents you the opportunity to once again choose your own adventure. For those who were there, catch what you missed. For those who weren’t, here are some of the highlights of the ideas, tools, and creative systems unveiled in the room.

Signal

Swimming with the Slop is live now on Bloomberg’s Everybody’s Business podcast. Our Main Stage session with Matt Zien and Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin was recorded at the AI & Creativity Summit in New York. A sharp, timely conversation on AI film, audience backlash, and the new creative terrain opening up in entertainment. Listen on Spotify here.

What if a brand campaign could scale around a single artist’s visual identity, with the art licensed, tracked, and compensated? Vered Horesh of Bria joined Noel Bunting of Publicis London on the Main Stage to announce Artfair by Bria, a new platform for building AI-powered campaigns around world-class, artist-owned visual identities. The first campaign on the platform, by Publicis London for Cathay Pacific across multiple surfaces from murals to online activations, showcases the unmistakable creative identity of Oliver Barrett, an award-winning illustrator. 

AWS brought together Christopher Sinnott, Jed Weintrob of 30 Ninjas, Bryan Yee of Innovative Dreams, and Jon Kreutzer of Zerospace for a practical Main Stage conversation on how AI is showing up inside real creative production workflows. The session moves past the demo-reel phase and into the harder questions of what saves time, what supports creative intent, and what actually works once AI enters the studio, pipeline, and production process.

Fashion has always been a system of taste, image, ownership, and control. AI is starting to rewrite all of it. In this session, Anthony Lupo of ArentFox Schiff joined Francis Pierrel of LR Paris for a high-level conversation on how AI is reshaping fashion, luxury, beauty, creativity, and IP.

Vibe Creation Showcase

What happens when app-building starts to feel more like sketching? Replit led a hands-on Vibe Creation Showcase in the Human Lounge, giving creators a closer look at how AI agents can help turn loose ideas into working tools, prototypes, and interactive experiences. The session brought Replit’s core premise into the room. Software is becoming something more people can make, test, and share without waiting for a full technical team.

Pulse

• Another Artist and the Machine feature in Forbes: This time by C.M. Rubin, with features of ten renowned creators that argue that AI is causing a shift towards taste, systems, emotional intelligence and human authorship.

• Martin Scorsese backs Black Forest Labs AI Startup: The New York Times reports that Scorsese noted, “Cinema is a young medium, only around 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it can evolve.”

• Artist and the Machine joins as a Supporting Partner: Of Benjamin Benichou’s invite-only event in Paris on the future of AI and craft, on the evening of June 19th. Artist and the Machine community will be prioritized if you request to join.

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com.

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx

Theme

The first wave of AI video was all about the thrill of the prompt - type a line, press enter, and out comes a moving image. Professional creative work, however, typically does not rely on the element of surprise as a core strategy. It relies on mapping out the intended outcome and working backwards to ensure that production can deliver on the creative vision.

The more interesting shift now taking place in AI is within production workflows, where ideas become shots, sequences, edits, approvals, and eventually, finished work. Creative teams need more than a beautiful first frame. They need characters that stay consistent across shots, scenes that hold together, tools that can move from storyboard to edit, and systems that make iteration feel less like starting over every time. This is where AI video starts to become truly useful.

Signal

That was the current running through The New Production Frontier, our Main Stage conversation featuring Tian Pei from LTX, Academy Award winner and Co-Founder of Magnopus Alex Henning, and BAFTA winner Habib Zargarpour, on how AI is changing professional creative production from film to advertising to brand storytelling. The conversation around AI video is growing up. The question has moved from “can it generate something wild?” towards “can it help us make the thing we actually meant to make?”

LTX sits directly amidst that shift, with a creative platform built to support the full arc of video production, from scripting and storyboarding through editing and final delivery. The bigger story is around how creative compression brings more of the production stack closer to the person shaping the idea. That dials up the importance of taste, direction, and process. Said another way, the best creative work still depends on a point of view, and AI now gives that point of view more room to move.

Summit

You’re the First to Know

1. Cannes Lions: We’re hosting something intimate and special on the Tuesday of Cannes Lions. Hit reply or message Dani if you will be there and we’ll get you on the list ✨

2. Crafted in Paris: Artist and the Machine is joining as a Supporting Partner of Benjamin Benichou’s invite-only event in Paris on the future of AI and craft, on the evening of June 19th. Artist and the Machine community will be prioritized if you request to join.

Pulse

• Artist and the Machine Featured in Forbes: Cortney Harding recapped highlights from the AI & Creativity Summit in New York, from Main Stage sessions, to workshops in the Human Lounge, and everything in between.

• The Filmmakers at Cannes Who Are Learning to Love AI: Featured in the Hollywood Reporter, a growing faction on the Croisette is making the case that technology should serve the artist rather than replace them.

• Social-native video is becoming a brand format: Vogue Business reported on the rise of micro-dramas as fashion brands experiment with short, narrative, video-first formats built for social distribution.

Our AI & Creativity Summit gathers the people shaping the future of creativity. After Hours extends that room into a virtual setting with more learning, practical exchange, and direct access to the field’s leading artists, technologists, executives, and builders.

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com.

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx

Theme

For those who weren’t with us in New York, we’re excited to share the full session recordings with you over the coming weeks. There was so much substance in these conversations, from Sasha Stiles in conversation with Nicholas Thompson on poetry in the age of AI, to King Willonius and Wes Hopkins on AI-powered storytelling, to frog and Archetype AI on the design stakes of physical intelligence. This week we’re recapping a few early highlights.

Summit

Poet and artist Sasha Stiles joined Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, on the Main Stage for a conversation on the evolving relationship between poetry, language, and technology. Together, they explored what it means to create in a more-than-human age, tracing the intersection of emotion and algorithm, ancient forms of memory and expression, and the new artistic possibilities emerging through AI, code, and hybrid imagination.

What does AI-powered storytelling actually look like in practice? At the AI & Creativity Summit in New York, our presenting Creative Partner Adobe joined the Main Stage for a fireside chat with Wes Hopkins and King Willonious. The two regaled the audience talking about how Adobe Firefly Foundry is helping creators move from vision to execution across image, motion, and sound, without losing the creative intent behind it. Alongside, Adobe also brought to life an engaging workshop on our Machine Stage and an activation that offered attendees the chance to build their own Sphere using the power of GenAI and creativity. Full session premiere coming soon.

Jason Severs and Inna Lobel of frog joined Leonardo Giusti of Archetype AI for ‘The Shape of Intelligence’, a conversation on the design stakes of physical AI. As AI moves from screens into objects, spaces, interfaces, and lifelike systems, design becomes central to how people understand and trust it. The discussion explored how form, behavior, context, and interaction shape our relationship with embodied intelligence, and how decisions made at the design level will influence whether these systems feel useful, intuitive, safe, or alienating.

After Hours

Our AI & Creativity Summit is the room where the field’s most consequential artists, technologists, executives, institutions, and builders come together to shape the future of this space. After Hours is how we expand that surface area. It will bring the same caliber of guests together, with room for practical exchange, deeper learning, and access to the people defining the next creative era.

The Lighthouse

The AI & Creativity Summit brought this full day of programming to The Lighthouse Brooklyn. The Lighthouse is a campus for creators with connected spaces in Los Angeles and New York. Built for artists, founders, storytellers, and culture makers working across disciplines, the campuses are where ideas move from concept to execution. Shaped by a community that collaborates through shared studios and programming. Tour the Brooklyn campus.

Pulse

• More NY Summit photos hot off the press: You’re more than welcome to share, and please tag @artistandthemachine when you do. Powered by our incredible partner, Air.

• We have partnered with Bloomberg: To give Artist and the Machine attendees a special offer. Get 3 months of unlimited access to Bloomberg.com.

• Community member Andrew Rosen published: ‘Bottlenecks and The Greenlight Gap’ inspired by his discussions at our AI & Creativity Summit in New York.

• Community member Jeff Ortegon created a Summit recap: Covering highlights and takeaways from conversations and programming across the day.

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com.

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx

Theme

What an incredible day - where do we even begin? Yesterday’s Summit made clear how far the AI and Creativity conversation has moved beyond tools. AI is leaving the screen and entering the studio, set, scent lab, sound booth, writer’s room, archive, brand system, legal department, and human imagination. The medium is becoming physical, social, emotional, and increasingly difficult to separate from creative life.

Summit

Kathleen Grace, Chief AI Officer at Lionsgate, spoke with Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, on AI in entertainment. Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin sat down with Matt Zien on the backlash, curiosity, and creative risk surrounding AI storytelling. David Rager from NASA spoke with Christina Ruffini from Bloomberg on how they are bringing their brand into the generative era. Wes Hopkins from Adobe and King Willonious traced how artists are building with new creative systems, while Viktoria Modesta opened up the frontier of metabodies.

This is just a snapshot of the day. Across every conversation, it was unmistakable that there has never been a more consequential moment for the future of creative industry. AI is changing what can be made, who gets to make it, and how entire fields define creativity. Session recordings coming soon - stay tuned.

Signal

That is why we’re unveiling After Hours, a new virtual AI & Creativity series for the conversations, workshops, and working sessions that deserve more time than a single day together can hold.

Our AI & Creativity Summit is the room where the field’s most consequential artists, technologists, executives, institutions, and builders come together to shape the future of this space. After Hours is how we expand that surface area. It will bring the same caliber of guests together with room for practical exchange, deeper learning, and access to the people defining the next creative era.

Photos

Our first batch of Summit photos has arrived via our partner Air. We’ll continue to add to this folder over the coming days, so feel free to check back. You’re welcome to share on socials, and we’d love for you to tag Artist and the Machine when you do!

Pulse

• Dani’s avatar by Nina Hawkins kicked off the opening remarks: The avatar that debuted at our last AI & Creativity Summit in LA and made a recent appearance in Times Square opened up Main Stage programming.

• Bria AI unveiled “Artfair” on the Main Stage at Summit: Artfair is a creative extension of Bria Create that lets brands and agencies build entire campaigns around a single artist's visual identity, at AI speed and global scale.

• StudioJadu announced the Jadu Pioneer Program: Including 4 time Emmy Award winner Fred Graver, digital storyteller Thom Woodley, futurist filmmaker Taryn O’Neill, and media entrepreneur Ashkan Karbasfrooshan.

• Summit attendee Sami Viitamäki made a vibe coded remix of our agenda: Sami built on the base of our agenda to track live sessions, which was vibe coded with Lovable 🤯 Meta vibe coding on the event floor.

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com.

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx

The Lighthouse, Brooklyn

The AI & Creativity Summit lands in New York next week, and standard tickets are now sold out. We built this program for people already past the obvious questions. Despite living and breathing these ideas day in and day out, the speaker prep calls have astounded our curatorial team. Again and again, the conversations move beyond the public AI discourse into more consequential territory.

In an early look at Chief AI Officer of Lionsgate, Kathleen Grace’s conversation with Nicholas Thompson, CEO of the Atlantic, they trace the next era of entertainment from the inside out: studio AI strategy, new production workflows across many tools, the future of filmmaking, and how audiences may discover, pay for, and experience stories as formats and devices change. And that is just one thread weaving through the broader tapestry of the day. With only a week to go, applications are open for the final remaining tickets.

Sponsor

With AI moving deeper into production across entertainment, media, and creative work, the infrastructure layer matters more than ever. That’s why we’re excited to welcome AWS to the sponsor lineup for our AI & Creativity Summit in NY. AWS provides the cloud, data, and AI infrastructure powering the next generation of media, entertainment, and creativity. With purpose-built services, pre-built solutions, deep industry expertise, and the largest community of industry-focused partners, AWS helps accelerate creative and enterprise teams to move from experimentation to production.

On the Agenda

Swimming With the Slop

Matt Zien's first AI film didn't go viral, it got him death threats instead. Since then, the cultural impact of AI has only become more polarized, especially in the space of arts and entertainment. In a live taping of Bloomberg's Everybody's Business, Max Chafkin interviews Matt on his 15-year TV journey that led to Midjourney, what the early reaction taught him about the field he stepped into, and the challenge facing creators who are simultaneously gauging audience appetite for AI storytelling and experimenting with the emerging medium.

The New Production Frontier

Professional creative production is undergoing its most fundamental shift - and even Hollywood, the industry with the most stringent requirements, is now embracing AI in ways that seemed unthinkable a year ago. A VFX veteran, an award-winning immersive studio, and the team behind one of the most widely adopted open-source AI video models explore what's actually changed: how AI capabilities have advanced from generative novelty to real frame-by-frame creative control, what open source unlocks that closed systems can't, and what it all means for everyone downstream - from film to advertising to brand storytelling and beyond. Featuring Tian Pei from LTX, Alex Henning from Magnopus, and Habib Zargarpour from USC.

Culture Shifters

The most interesting creative work today is being driven by cutting-edge creatives and category-defining platforms like OpenArt, who understand culture deeply enough to know what to build next, and move fast enough to define the format before anyone else arrives. A look inside the tools, the instincts, and work at the forefront of technology and culture, as well as an exploration of how AI is empowering creativity across advertising, music, film, and art. Featuring Coco Mao, CEO & Co-founder of OpenArt, Kristen Bender, SVP of Digital Innovation Strategy & BD at Universal Music Group, and Chris Neff, Global Chief AI Officer at Anomaly.

The Lighthouse

The AI & Creativity Summit brings this full day of programming to The Lighthouse Brooklyn. The Lighthouse is a campus for creators with connected spaces in Los Angeles and New York. Built for artists, founders, storytellers, and culture makers working across disciplines, the campuses are where ideas move from concept to execution. Shaped by a community that collaborates through shared studios and programming. Tour the Brooklyn campus.

Pulse

• Fabien Giraud at the Venice Biennale: Ahead of his appearance in the session “The Wild Machine” at our Summit in NY, artist Fabien Giraud is front and center in one of the most reputable shows at the Venice Biennale.

• Radiohead's Motion Picture House Opens Next Week in Brooklyn: The limited-run experience from a member of our community leads fans through a labyrinth of KID A and AMNESIAC art and sculpture before entering a custom screening room for KID A MNESIA, with a new soundtrack mixed from the original multitracks in 6-point spatial audio.

• Apple to Let Users Choose Rival AI Models Across Its iOS 27 Features: Bloomberg reports that users will be able to select from multiple third-party AI models for tasks like generating and editing text and images, building on Apple’s strategy to turn their devices into a comprehensive AI platform.

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com.

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx

Welcome to the dawn of a new era for AI & Creativity. We’re honored to welcome Adobe as our returning Presenting Creative Partner across 2026.

Adobe gives everyone, from emerging artists to global brands, everything they need to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences. They are passionate about empowering people to create beautiful and powerful images, videos, and apps, and transforming how companies interact with their customers across every screen.

See them onstage and activating at our AI & Creativity Summit in NY in May, and in the meantime explore Adobe Firefly Foundry. Adobe Firefly Foundry enables users to unlock creative precision at enterprise-scale with proprietary, IP-protected generative AI models – responsibly trained on your brand or franchise.

Artist Feature

Bloomchild by Alexia Adána

Alexia Adána is the Forward Deployed Creative Lead at Luma and visual artist whose work explores the intersection of brand storytelling, emerging technology, and culture. Her practice is grounded in the belief that technology can be a powerful force for creative expression and human-centered innovation. Seen here, Bloomchild is an immersive narrative and evolving artistic universe rooted in self-acceptance, empathy, and healing. The trailer offers a first glimpse into a dreamlike world that invites viewers to see their uniqueness as a source of beauty. Alexia takes the stage at our NY Summit for the session “New Brand Imagination” alongside David Rager of NASA, Ari Kuschnir of m ss ng p eces, Craig Elimeliah of Code and Theory, and Ryan Jones of David Yurman.

On the Agenda

Voices of the Impossible: How AI Is Redefining Creative Expression.

What if you could learn, create, and experience content through the voices of icons? In this fireside chat, David Joerg from Chess.com and Taheeb Sonekan from ElevenLabs explore how voice AI is unlocking entirely new creative formats, from training with legendary chess players to reimagining how products teach, engage, and inspire. A look at how creators and companies can now build experiences that were unimaginable just a year ago.

The Art & Algorithm of Scent

How olfactory culture, luxury perfumers, and disruptive technologies such as AI are revolutionizing the consumer experience and defining the future of fragrance artistry. A conversation across the industry - from legacy fragrance houses already integrating AI into their craft, to master perfumers, to the disrupters and cultural voices challenging the status quo - on what happens when algorithms enter the lab, how they change the creative process, and what it all means for the future of scent. Featuring Farah Ahmed of Fragrance Creators Association, Matthieu Befve of Givaudan, Natasha Côté-Mouzannar of IFF, and Teddy Haugan.

Stop Selling AI Content

The photo, the commercial, the deliverable – these are no longer the prize. What clients crave is the unfolding ritual of creation itself. In this new age of Creative, process becomes the product. Which leaves the industry to confront a larger truth: what forms in the wake when the making, not the made, is what clients seek? Featuring Benjamin Benichou of ©3.11LABS and Charlton Roberts of FLORA.

Browse the full agenda here.

We hope to see you in New York on May 14, 2026, where we will continue to explore the forefront of AI & Creativity together, in-person. We're down to our last few spots:

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com.

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx

The Lighthouse, Brooklyn

Summit

We're just weeks away from gathering at The Lighthouse in Brooklyn, with the agenda set, speaker lineup stacked, and Bloomberg Media on board as our official media partner.

Voices taking the stage span the full range of AI & Creativity. From Kathleen Grace, Chief AI Officer of Lionsgate, and Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, to Academy Award winner and Co-Founder of Magnopus Alex Henning, BAFTA winner Habib Zargarpour, and world-renowned architect Bjarke Ingels. Over the course of the day, we'll move from the practical to the philosophical – what AI means for workflows today and what it means for craft over the long term. We will ask meaningful questions and continue the conversation, together, in the room, on May 14.

Sponsor

Bria gives creative and technical teams the tools to generate, edit, and automate visual content at scale. Bria is the visual AI platform built for production. Controllable, IP-safe, and built on 100% licensed data. No prompt roulette, just deterministic outputs that integrate into any workflow, from first prototype to full production.

Named No. 8 on Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies 2026, Bria joins the sponsor lineup for our AI & Creativity Summit in NY this May, where they'll announce a new way for artists to tame the machine, and have it work for them.

Session

Epidemic Sound comes to life this May with “The Sonic Lab: Better, Faster Studio!” Attendees will be able to join leaders from Epidemic Sound for a behind-the-scenes look at their new Studio feature to see how video and sound finally become one, leaving temp tracks and "close enough" audio in the past. Create bespoke, high-fidelity audio from a single prompt and step into the future of sound. If you’re coming to Summit, save the activation on our agenda so you don’t miss it.

Pulse

• Emotion Concepts and Their Function in a Large Language Model: Anthropic found that Claude forms internal patterns that resemble emotions, and these seem to influence how it behaves. That could help researchers design AI systems that are more stable and predictable over time.

• Character.ai Launches AI-Powered ‘Books’ Feature: Allowing users to step inside and interact with classic works of literature such as Pride and Prejudice and The Great Gatsby.

• The 70-Person AI Image Startup Taking on Silicon Valley's Giants: Black Forest Labs has signed deals with Adobe, Canva, Meta, and Microsoft, and now has its sights set on powering robots and smart glasses.

We hope to see you in NY on May 14, 2026, where we will continue these conversations on the forefront of AI & Creativity:

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com.

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx

Hi friends, cyborgs,

Dani here! I've been staring at this agenda for a week trying to figure out how to express this, and I keep coming back to the same feeling: I can't believe we get to do this.

Artist and the Machine started as a simple, almost instinctive idea - the human artist co-creating with the machine. The real and raw exploration of what that could and should be, at a time when our timelines are accelerating in ways we could have never imagined.

The first version of that idea took shape as an enlightenment-inspired Salon, where the people building AI could also be the ones shaping culture. That technical ambition and human creativity don’t have to sit on opposite sides of the table.

That was February 2024, just two days before OpenAI announced SORA (a century ago in AI time), and I remember the energy in that room. Just over two years later, we’ll be back in Brooklyn, with three stages, 400 handpicked visionaries, Bloomberg Media as our Official Media Partner, and a lineup I genuinely cannot wait for you to see.

Take a look below for the first reveal, and if you’re debating whether to attend, this is your sign to join us.

See you in Brooklyn,

Dani

Agenda

The full agenda for this year’s AI & Creativity Summit in New York is live! Taking place at the Lighthouse in Brooklyn, the program spans three stages and a full day of sessions across the AI & Creativity stack, from infrastructure to culture, and everything in between. For more details on the programming, browse the sessions live on our site below.

Summit

We’re delighted to have OpenArt joining as a sponsor, and CEO Coco Mao on stage with us this May.

Coco Mao is CEO & Co-founder of OpenArt, a leading AI video & image generation platform where 8M+ monthly active users access 100+ latest AI models. Prior to OpenArt, she built a startup acquired by Google. In 2022, she co-founded OpenArt to democratize storytelling and empower anyone to bring their characters, stories, and worlds to life. Beyond building a tool for everyone, OpenArt is constantly defining what’s next, from solving character consistency to world consistency, unlocking new creative possibilities across film, advertising, music videos, and TV shows.

Get a 20% discount off OpenArt for one month with the code: AMFRIENDS

Pulse

• Meta Announces New AI Model in Major Test of Company’s Ambitions: WSJ reports that the disappointment of last model’s release more than a year ago led to an expensive overhaul of the company’s AI operations.

• Spotify’s Prompted Playlist Feature Will Now Work for Podcasts: TechCrunch details how the company is expanding its AI-powered feature to create playlists, called Prompted Playlist, to include podcasts as well.

• Community Member and NY Summit Speaker Ari Kuschnir’s Work Went Viral: Featuring an imagining of what Trump’s library might be like once it’s built.

Join us in NY on May 14, 2026, where we will continue these conversations on the forefront of AI & Creativity - space is extremely limited.

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com.

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx

Theme

Less than two years ago we hosted our first gathering. Today, Bloomberg Media has joined as the Official Media Partner of our AI & Creativity Summit, covering the New York edition on May 14 and the Los Angeles in December. This marks a new moment of growth for our Summit series shaping the front lines of AI & Creativity.

Signal

Our AI & Creativity Summit convenes brand executives, creatives, founders and researchers for a full day of programming at the frontier of AI and Creativity – where artists are charting new territory with AI as collaborator, IP is repositioned as infrastructure for a generative era, world models are opening a spatial frontier beyond language, and the agentic shift is fundamentally rewriting how we work and exist. Sessions span fashion and luxury, media and storytelling, neuroscience and human augmentation, music and audio, with thought leadership and live practitioner workflows across all stages.

"What started as an underground salon series is now the Summit where the CEOs of major brands and media companies, Grammy-winning producers, and MIT researchers are all on the same stage. We are at an inflection point for creative work. What gets decided in the next few years about AI, creativity, and culture will matter for a very long time.” – Dani Van de Sande, Founder of Artist and the Machine.

Summit Lineup So Far

Speakers include Kathleen Grace (Chief AI Officer, Lionsgate), Nicholas Thompson (CEO, The Atlantic), Doug Shapiro (Founder, Doug Shapiro Media), Sinead Bovell (Futurist & Strategic Foresight Advisor), Francis Pierrel (Partner & CEO, LR Paris), Marcus Frödin (VP Engineering for Music, Spotify), Haya Odeh (Co-founder & VP of Design, Replit), Benjamin Benichou (Founder, ©3.11LABS), Kakul Srivastava (CEO, Splice), Matt Zien (Founder, KNGMKR Labs), Chris Neff (Global Chief AI Officer, Anomaly), Kristen Bender (VP, Digital Innovation Strategy & Business Development, Universal Music Group), Ceej Vega (Founder & Creative Technologist, Vega Studio), Ari Kuschnir (Founder, m ss ng p eces), Alex Henning (Academy Award Winner, Best Visual Effects), Coco Mao (CEO & Co-founder, OpenArt), Leonardo Giusti (Chief Design Officer, Archetype AI), Zan Gilani (Director of Product Management, Duolingo), (Hilary Mason (CEO and Co-Founder, Hidden Door), Inna Lobel (Head of Industrial Design North America, frog), Fabien Giraud (Artist), Craig Elimeliah (Chief Creative Officer, Code and Theory), Pat Pataranutaporn (Cyborg Psychology Research Program, MIT), Anthony Lupo (Chairman, ArentFox Schiff), Farah Ahmed (President & CEO, Fragrance Creators Association), Matthieu Befve (Head of Fine Fragrance North America, Givaudan), Lauren Ducrey (Poet & AI Strategist).

Sponsors confirmed to date include Adobe, Replit, ElevenLabs, Luma, OpenArt, LTX, Epidemic Sound, frog design, AWS, FLORA; and the Summit will be hosted at The Lighthouse.

We hope to see you in NY on May 14, 2026, where we will continue these conversations on the forefront of AI and Creativity:

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com.

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx

Theme

Creative industries are sorting into two camps on AI, and the fault line is usually described as ethical – artists who oppose it versus technologists who embrace it. However, the difference between these stances is almost entirely structural.

Netflix is reportedly paying up to $600 million for InterPositive, Ben Affleck's AI filmmaking tools startup, which is built on the premise that a filmmaker's existing production assets can train a model that then extends their creative control in post. That is a bet that AI, when built around a creator's own work, creates rather than extracts value.

Signal

Most creative IP was built for a world where copying required effort and resemblance required intent. AI changes both assumptions. Recently, Higgsfield launched a similarity-scoring tool that flags AI-generated content for resemblance to celebrity likenesses, characters, and cinematic signatures. Meanwhile WGA seeks payment for AI training on on writers’ scripts. Both are acknowledgments that the gap between generation and infringement has narrowed enough to necessitate new ways to track and monetize IP.

The InterPositive model points to one version of a solution: a filmmaker’s dailies become the training data for a model that serves their own creative vision. The IP doesn’t get consumed, but rather, extended. That is a fundamentally different relationship between creative work and AI than the one that has driven most of the industry’s anxiety.

The creators who figure this out first will be the ones who upgrade their IP to integrate AI, making it legible, licensable, and participatory in the value it generates. Those opposed to AI are mostly opposed to a specific condition: extraction without recognition or compensation. This is territory we’ve charted before with the advent of new mediums such as cinema, television, streaming, and mobile. Each unlocked new distribution and markets for IP that existing frameworks weren't built to handle.

Summit

Before there was code, before there was canvas, there was scent — the original (invisible) art. A single fragrance can arouse desires, settle nerves, revive a precious memory, or elevate a task to a ritual. A profoundly human art that has uplifted lives since the dawn of civilization is now meeting the most disruptive technological moment in history. 

Fragrance Creators Association is joining the AI & Creativity Summit in New York as a sponsor, and their President & CEO Farah Ahmed is taking our stage.

A biochemist, attorney, and industry strategist, Farah built her career at the edge of what's possible and what's permissible, leading a collective of the world's most inventive companies, shaping policy in Washington to accelerate innovation, and advising international trade stakeholders on how to expand fragrance markets across a shifting geoeconomic landscape. She runs the organization that gives a multibillion-dollar fragrance industry its voice, and she's coming to our stage with a provocation: what happens when humanity's most sensory art form collides with its most powerful new tool?

Fragrance Creators Association represents the scent industry at the intersection of art, science, and human experience, championing an industry transforming chemistry into identity and culture.

Pulse

• WIPO Launches Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Interchange: A new initiative for expert dialogue on IP and AI issues that will focus on technical and operational issues.

• ElevenLabs artist Harry Yeff explores agentic voice systems: Translating ecological data into conversational experience to frame a new category of expressive AI.

• Okara launches world’s first AI CMO: Where users input website details and a team of agents deploys to drive traffic and user growth.

We hope to see you in NY on May 14, 2026, where we will continue these conversations on the forefront of AI and Creativity:

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com.

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx

Theme

Something is shifting in how AI touches creative work. For years, the model was augmentation – AI as a faster brush, a cheaper render, a tireless assistant. The emerging model is different. Agents now handle end-to-end creative production, planning work, executing across formats, evaluating outputs, returning for direction only when a decision is genuinely human. Luma's recent announcement is one proof point among many, and the pattern is becoming hard to ignore. So then, what does creative work actually consist of once production is handled?

Signal

When production is compressed, the work that remains is almost entirely conceptual. Creative direction. Brand logic. The decision about what's worth making at all. Two-person teams can now run campaigns that used to require dozens. The arithmetic of creative bandwidth is being revised in real time, and the open question is no longer whether the workload shrinks (it does), but whether the thinking expands to fill it.

The most useful parallel here might come from film. When digital cameras made professional-quality production affordable, the question shifted towards whether the person behind the equipment had an idea worth capturing. Technical barriers came down, but the creative and narrative demands didn't. Creative AI tooling is doing something structurally similar, just faster and across more disciplines at once. The people positioned well are those who carry strong creative opinions and have something compelling to say.

Summit

Creative work in AI is moving from prompts to agents that execute. Fresh off the launch of UNI-1 and Luma Agents, their new unified intelligence system for end-to-end creative workflows, we’re welcoming Luma as a sponsor of our upcoming AI & Creativity Summit in New York! Luma’s approach centers on physically intelligent creative agents that maintain context, route the right models, and advance work across stages so teams can stay focused on taste, direction, and intent.

Luma is defining a new paradigm for creative work with unified intelligence systems, where models, agents, and teams collaborate with shared context to execute across the entire workflow. Built on advanced world models and designed for media, entertainment, marketing, and beyond, Luma enables teams to direct, iterate, and scale creative work with speed, control, and coherence.

We’re excited to welcome new voices to our Speaker lineup: Marcus Frodin (Head of Engineering, Spotify), Ceej Vega (Creative Technologist), Francis Pierrel (Founder & CEO, LR Paris), and many more. There’s big news on the horizon. Don’t miss Summit Announcements on our Socials - Linkedin & Instagram.

Pulse

• Scientists discover AI can make humans more creative: AI is often framed as replacing human work, but new research from Swansea University shows it functions more effectively as a creative collaborator.

• Meta buys 'social media network for AI' Moltbook: A Reddit-like social network where AI agents talk to each other, moving the team into its Superintelligence Labs to explore new ways autonomous bots can collaborate and work for people and businesses.

• OpenAI shuts down Sora: Disney pulls its planned investment.

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx

Theme

The printing press reorganized religion and politics. Cinema globalized storytelling and converged culture across borders. Television relocated media into the living room and domesticated entertainment. Each technological shift changed not only distribution, but behavior: where we gathered, how long we paid attention, who we experienced stories with, and which narratives could plausibly dominate.

Signal

We are in the middle of another paradigm shift. What appears to be an expansion of formats, including short-form video, AI-native micro dramas, interactive plot lines, and immersive worlds, is a deeper shift in how culture is produced, distributed, and lived. Mobile and AI are not simply tools layered onto existing systems; they define the constraints within which media and entertainment now evolve.

Read the full report below, with contributions from Michael Wise, Jon Rogers, Don Allen Stevenson III, Hannah Elsakr, and Liz Tingue.

THE MEDIUM IS NOT NEUTRAL

1.32 MB • PDF File

Download

Summit

We are just under two months away from our AI & Creativity Summit in New York, and the speaker lineup is heating up. Featured speakers include Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic, Kakul Srivastava, the CEO of Splice, Sinead Bovell, Doug Shapiro, researchers from MIT, and many more. Stay tuned for the unveiling of our full speaker lineup and agenda ahead of the event.

& Beyond

A common thing we hear from companies after our events: "How do we bring this inside our organization?"

Starting this year, we're offering a small number of custom AI & Creativity immersion experiences for enterprises, purpose-built for internal teams, leadership groups, and agency partners who want to move beyond the conversation and into genuine creative exploration with AI.

If this sounds like something your company needs, just respond to this email. We'd love to talk.

Pulse

• Anthropic releases study on what 81,000 people want from AI: The largest qualitative study of its kind, users share how they use AI, what they dream it could make possible, and what they fear it might do.

• Yann LeCun Raises $1 Billion to Build AI That Understands the Physical World: Wired reports that Meta’s former chief AI scientist has long argued that human-level AI will come from mastering the physical world, not language.

• Hollywood Needs AI: A guest column in The Wrap making the case for why media and entertainment should embrace the frontier technology.

We hope to see you in NY on May 14, 2026, where we will continue these conversations on the forefront of AI and Creativity:

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com.

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx

Theme

Products, interfaces, businesses – the cost of making just about anything is approaching zero. As Fast Company covers, a team of two rebuilt the interface of a $29 billion company in a week. The wall between designer, developer, and founder is gone.

This was always the promise of software: that ideas could scale without the friction of physical production. What's changed is that the last remaining hurdle, the technical skill required to build, has collapsed too. You no longer need to know how to code to ship code. You no longer need a design team to have a designed product. The bottleneck has moved, and it has moved decisively, away from execution and toward something harder to name and harder to replicate. What gets built now, and who builds it, is an entirely different question.

Signal

The standard read on this shift goes something like: when creation gets cheap, the work gets commoditized, so value moves up the stack to taste and discernment. That's true, but incomplete. It still imagines a few good taste-makers rising to the top of a flattened field.

The more interesting shift is structural. When the cost of building approaches zero, the economics of personalization also change. Products and experiences that once required a funded company become viable at the scale of one. What people follow will shift accordingly toward what is in proximity to them and what is made for their context and community. The Cambrian explosion isn't just about volume of work produced, but also the diversity of small, highly adapted things filling niches that generalist products never could.

Taste still matters, sure, but the question is no longer just whether you have it. It's whether it's specific enough to find the people it belongs to.

Summit

Creative workflows are shifting from isolated tools to unified environments where models and media can move together, and no one knows this better than FLORA.

We’re welcoming FLORA to the sponsor lineup and their founder Weber as a speaker at our upcoming AI & Creativity Summit in New York.

FLORA is building the creative environment for the generative era with all the best creative AI models across text, image and video in one infinite canvas. Connect media together to build generative workflows and explore any creative idea faster than ever before.

Pulse

• Luma AI launches creative AI agents powered by its new ‘Unified Intelligence’ models: Designed to handle end-to-end creative work across text, image, video, and audio.

• Netflix acquires Ben Affleck’s startup InterPositive: Which builds AI models from a film’s dailies to assist with postproduction tasks like color, relighting and VFX while keeping filmmakers “at the center of the process.”

• Our friends at Luma AI, AWS, and ElevenLabs are hosting a workshop at SXSW: Where brands, filmmakers, and agency leaders will have the chance to build AI-workflows from scratch.

We hope to see you in NY on May 14, 2026, where we will continue these conversations on the forefront of AI and Creativity:

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at community@artistandthemachine.com.

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx