Early Bird Tickets Live for LA
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
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Humans Are Still in Charge: Time reports on what leaders at Cannes Lions are saying about creativity in the age of AI.
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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.’
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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.
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Paige Piskin is an award-winning AI and XR creator, known for pushing the boundaries of digital makeup, character design, and augmented reality experiences. With AR effects generating more than 300 billion impressions, shared 2 billion times, Paige has worked with major brands like Netflix, Bratz, Warner, and Coldplay, bringing immersive storytelling to life. She has also been a guest judge for Netflix, consultant, and 2x hackathon winner, recognized for her innovative work in AI-driven AR experiences. Paige is passionate about blending generative AI with character design, expanding the possibilities of digital self-expression and interactive storytelling.
Claire Silver is an anonymous AI-Collaborative artist that works with oil, acrylic, collage, photography, and different digital mediums to create her work. She often blends the classical style and mythos into her art, collaboratively producing work that feels at once familiar and strange. Her work explores themes of innocence, trauma, the hero’s journey, and how our view of them will change in an increasingly transhumanist future. Claire’s art can be found in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has been at Sotheby’s London and Christie’s New York and in galleries, museums, and festivals all over the world. Featured in the New York Times, WIRED, Fortune, NPR, and countless podcasts, Claire takes every opportunity to explore her unending fascination with AI, fight for visibility for this budding art movement, and wonder at the magnitude of this moment in history. She often feels like a caveman painting fire. Claire is vocal in her belief that with the rise of AI, for the first time, the barrier of skill is swept away and that in this evolving era, taste is the new skill.