Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Critics at Large | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

Society & Culture

4.4 • 678 Ratings

🗓️ 23 October 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Generative A.I., once an uncanny novelty, is now being used to create not only images and videos but entire “artists.” Its boosters claim that the technology is merely a tool to facilitate human creativity; the major use cases we’ve seen thus far—and the money being poured into these projects—tell a different story. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the output of Timbaland’s A.I. rapper TaTa Taktumi and the synthetic actress Tilly Norwood. They also look back at movies and television that imagined what our age of A.I. would look like, from “2001: A Space Odyssey” onward. “A.I. has been a source of fascination, of terror, of appeal,” Schwartz says. “It’s the human id in virtual form—at least in human-made art.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

TaTa Taktumi’s “Glitch x Pulse”
Cardi B’s “Am I the Drama?”
“Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE” (2024)
“Dear Tilly Norwood,” by Betty Gilpin (The Hollywood Reporter)
Tilly Norwood’s Instagram account
“Holly Herndon’s Infinite Art,” by Anna Wiener (The New Yorker)
“2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968)
“The Morning Show” (2019—)
“Simone” (2002)
“Blade Runner” (1982)
“Ex Machina” (2014)
“The Man Who Sells Unsellable New York Apartments,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” by Walter Benjamin
“The Death of the Author,” by Roland Barthes

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker.
0:07.6	I'm Nomi Fry.
0:08.6	I'm Vincent Cunningham.
0:09.7	And I'm Alex Schwartz.
0:11.2	Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here.
0:16.5	Hello, my fellow critics.
0:18.7	Hello.
0:18.8	Hello, Alex. Hello, Vincent. How's it going, you guys?
0:21.9	It's going good. It's a new day in New York. It's a new dawn, it's a new day. Yeah. I'm feeling good. And we're feeling good. Or is it? Da, da, da. Well, that's what we're here to discuss. Exactly. It's a big topic today, my friends. It's a big topic because unless you've
0:38.6	been under a rock or perhaps more likely in some kind of beautiful cottage in the Cotswolds,
0:45.2	gardening, how lucky you are, being it removed from the world at large, you've probably noticed
0:51.7	that in the last couple of years, artificial intelligence has become
0:57.2	more and more prevalent in basically every part of life. And especially something called generative
1:03.3	AI, which is AI built to create new content, not just to enable analysis or organization of
1:08.4	existing content. The future is here. The future is now.
1:12.6	I mean, chat GPT, this thing that now everybody knows, it was introduced to the public in November
1:18.6	2022, and now they have over 700 million weekly active users.
1:24.6	Of course, they're not the only game in town.
1:26.6	Every big tech company seems to want to get into this AI race, unsurprisingly. I mean, I saw some other thing that said that at this point, 99% of people have used AI in one form or another, often without knowing that they're using it. But it's kind of impossible to be online and increasingly in the world without it. So it's becoming pervasive in general.
1:45.6	And it's also, and here is where we come in, starting to become pervasive in the arts.
1:51.9	Guys, tell me a little bit of what we've been seeing with AI in the world of culture.
1:57.1	You know, every day brings more and more gifts in this realm.
	...

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