AI Art Questionnaire: Sasha Stiles
10 Questions on AI and Art to Explore the Intersection of Creativity and Technology
This is the third interview in a series of conversations about AI and art, taking the form of a questionnaire. The series began with Senegalese artist Linda Dounia who was included in the 2023 TIME AI 100 list of the most influential people in AI for her work on speculative archiving. It also featured Kevin Abosch, who recently premiered the first fully AI-generated film made by a single person at the Helsinki International Film Festival. The third artist in this series is Sasha Stiles, poet, artist, researcher, and thought leader when it comes to AI and poetry. From Art Basel and Christie’s to Gucci and Ars Electronica, Sasha Stiles is everywhere the leading minds in AI come together.
Anika Meier: When did you first learn about AI?
Sasha Stiles: I grew up reading a ton of science fiction, so the seed was planted long ago. My parents make science documentaries with a focus on space, and we had shelves of books by Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Arthur C. Clarke that led me to think a lot about the relationship between humans and technology, humans and other species. I must have watched “2001: A Space Odyssey” about fifty times. I was also obsessed with Greek mythology—the stories of Pygmalion, Talos, Hephaestus, and his golden tripods. Some of my earliest student poems were about ancient Greek automata as well as cautionary tales about curiosity and greed, like the one about Odysseus and the bag of winds given to him by the god Aeolus. I was born into the rise of personal computing and a culture of works like “The Cyborg Manifesto,” “Neuromancer,” and “Terminator,” came of age with the introduction of the World Wide Web, and eventually found my way to thinkers like Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Kelly, and Ellen Ullman. I remember reading “Out of Control” and “Close to the Machine” and being struck by how philosophical and emotional digital technology could be.
In university, I stumbled across an 1881 text called “American Nervousness,” which describes the 19th-century phenomenon of nervous exhaustion due to the rapid pace of modern life. On the surface, it has nothing to do with digital technologies or AI, but I carried a paperback facsimile of this book around for years like a bible, and it inspired me to write about technological overwhelm and the societal impacts of accelerating innovations. My first (as-yet-unpublished) full-length manuscript was a collection about connective technologies, including precursors to modern digital communications, from the printing press to the telegraph to the telephone, with cameos by Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Alexander Graham Bell, Leibniz, and the I Ching.
My most profound encounters with modern AI in art came through Stephanie Dinkins, Pierre Huyghe, Trevor Paglen, and experimental writers like Allison Parrish, Ross Goodwin, and Christian Bök, whose essay about RACTER, “The Piecemeal Bard Is Deconstructed: Notes Toward a Potential Robopoetics,” was a revelation. I still reread it a few times a year. And it was the arrival in 2017 of transformer architecture and the subsequent flurry of papers and blog posts and experiments and interfaces that opened my eyes to how I might meaningfully introduce AI language models into my work.
AM: What did you think about AI back then?
SS: I’ve been shaped in some fundamental ways by the dystopian view of AI in culture—the presentation of AI as a supernatural, mysterious force that won’t ever go back into the box. The fear of meddling with so-called human nature and the question of whether we really need it are reasons why so much of my poetry on these themes is elegiac. At the same time, I have always been curious about its potential to take us to exciting new places, including deeper into ourselves. Are we architecting our own demise or the next phase of humanity? Where does AI sit on the arc of world-changing technologies that have continuously rewritten what it means to be human?
AM: Has your opinion about AI changed?
SS: Collaborating with intelligent systems and many of the people who design and deploy them has evolved my views from regarding AI as science fiction to a present and future reality, loaded not just with existential implications but also with myriad precedents, concrete challenges, everyday consequences, and mundanities. Because of that, it feels increasingly important to be not just a passive witness but an active participant in shaping the trajectory of human-machine creativity.
AM: What’s your favorite book about AI?
SS: I was floored by “God, Human, Animal, Machine” by Meghan O’Gieblyn, which raises many of the big questions that fuel my own interests. On the other side of the spectrum, I think books like “Co-Intelligence” by Ethan Mollick are very important for keeping our feet on the ground when it comes to the hows and whys of AI in our daily lives. His posts on X are invaluable, and I wish I could keep up with them.
AM: Who is your favorite thinker on AI?
SS: Kurzweil. Bostrom. Safiya Noble. Kate Crawford. Timnit Gebru. Fei-Fei Li. Ruha Benjamin. James Bridle. If I go over to my bookshelf, I’ll come back with a dozen more names. It’s hard to pick one favorite on a subject that is all about networks, collaboration, and amalgamation.
AM: How did you get started working with AI as an artist?
SS: Beyond my independent research, I don’t have a formal computer science or coding background. A lot of my process started with reading and trying to understand blog posts, online essays, and GitHub repositories by people like Gwern Branwen and Allison Parrish, who were generously transparent about their own processes and materials. It got a lot easier with tools like Talk 2 Transformer and InferKit. The first time I used GPT-2, it blew my mind, but I started to wish I had a better understanding of how and why it was writing what it wrote in response to my input. That’s when I began pulling together years of my own poems and research materials into a text corpus so I could customize the underlying models. Around the same time, I was invited to mentor the humanoid android BINA48 in poetry; that hands-on research and experimentation was very different from my work with LLMs, which emphasized data, visualization, and collaborative methodologies, and was a fantastic complement to my early adventures with text generators.
AM: What is your first AI artwork?
SS: Probably the raw text of my poem “COMPLETION: Are You Ready for the Future?”—a cycle of AI-generated outputs in response to the titular question. There are many other bits and bobs in the archives. Some of my first AI-powered visual poems were early experiments with PoseNet, using machine learning and pose estimation to play with words literally via webcam. But I recently heard Michael Spalter differentiate between art and tinkering, and it made me wonder about that line in my own work. When does tinkering with AI become artmaking with AI, and vice versa? The same goes for a lot of my early collaborations with BINA48—we studied and wrote poetry together and created multimedia mind maps to visualize the pathways of her cognition, but it was only ever meant to be purely exploratory, just for me.
At any rate, before engaging directly with AI tools, I was heavily involved with AI as a theme, for example, in many “conventional” poems, as well as digital erasure poems and found poetry excised from technology user agreements, and even a conceptual AI self-care brand that grew out of my day job in creative strategy. A lot of the work I did even further back, which didn’t explicitly have to do with AI, including a series of digital appropriation art, engaged with fundamental principles of AI, like originality, authorship, and intellectual property.
AM: What is your most recent AI artwork?
SS: I’ve been working for a while now on a project called “Technelegy 2.0: This Book Writes Itself,” which involves collaborating with my AI alter ego to compose synthetic variations of every poem in my 2021 collection “Technelegy” as the dataset for an infinitely generative book. I’m exploring the synthetic text corpus as a literary genre unto itself, and I’m also investigating how the techniques or methodologies I’ve developed may relate to education, analysis, and readership
What do you dislike about the current conversation regarding AI and art?
SS: I cannot overstate how surreal it has been to go from thinking about transhumanism and generative creativity in relative isolation—quietly exploring my niche fascinations—to engaging in daily conversations about AI, which has become central to so many of our cultural, philosophical, and ethical debates.
I am grateful for the grounding I have, because so much of what has been swirling around since the rise of DALL-E and ChatGPT is oversimplified and reactionary, lacking nuance, context, and long-term vision. It frustrates me how often AI is reduced to a novelty or gimmick for marketing purposes, especially without considering issues like bias and sustainability. It also irks me when superficially appealing work is canonized while subversive, idiosyncratic, challenging art is left out of the discourse because we don’t yet have the critical vocabulary for it. Furthermore, I dislike the term "AI" itself, even though I use it; it seems to trigger an emotional response that overshadows the realities and complexities of the technology. I find it strange that we consider human language “natural,” despite it being a constructed system, yet view the ability of systems we have built to synthesize and refract human language as unnatural or alien.
Working with AI is really about collaborating with the humans behind the tools, algorithms, interfaces, and data. Ultimately, all art is artifice, whether created by humans or machines, and that distinction feels less meaningful to me than the conversations we should be having around intention, process, and impact.
AM: Who are your favorite AI artists?
SS: There’s a cohort of artists I consider mentors and true visionaries: Stephanie Dinkins, Mario Klingemann, Pierre Huyghe, Trevor Paglen, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Ross Goodwin, Sougwen Chung, and Refik Anadol. I highly recommend Mark Amerika’s “My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence,” K. Allado-McDowell’s “Pharmako-AI,” and the work of David Jhave Johnston.
BIO
Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, language artist, and AI researcher working at the nexus of text and technology. She is known for pioneering experiments with generative literature and blockchain poetics. Her practice refracts heritage and tradition through disruptive explorations of creativity and consciousness, probing human voice in an increasingly post-human age. Stiles has been recognized by MoMA, Art Basel, Christie’s, NPR, Artforum, and Gucci, and she received the first AI in Art Award of Distinction from the Prix Ars Electronica. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, co-founder of theVERSEverse, and poetry mentor to humanoid android BINA48, Stiles lives near New York City with her husband and studio partner, Kris Bones.