'Artificial Intelligence?' No, Collective Intelligence.
About this episode
Klein argues most AI art is 'crappy' because generative systems are inherently generic, then presents Holly Herndon as a counterexample: she uses AI to become 'weirder, stranger, more uncanny, more personal.' Herndon — raised singing in church choirs in East Tennessee before moving through Berlin techno, which she calls a 'coordination technology' — explains PROTO (2019), built with 'Spawn,' an AI 'baby' trained on human ensemble voices, and her later Holly+ voice model, a governed public instrument built from her own voice. Her core claim: AI is not artificial intelligence but collective intelligence — 'aggregate human intelligence, trained on all of us' — more like choral singing than a machine oracle. They explore the meaning question (why AI outputs feel hollow), her Spawning project building universal training-data opt-out tools, the flattening sameness of infinite media, and her insistence that 'the model is the art.'