Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I'm Lila Raptopoulos. My colleague John Thornhill recently saw a movie that he really liked that wasn't made by humans. It was auto-generated by a machine so that it's never shown the same way twice. The film is called Eno, and it takes 500 hours of footage shot over the lifetime of the artist, Brian Eno.

Humans were involved, of course. They shot the original footage, human editors, cut that footage into scenes.

But after the initial edit, an algorithm was set loose that combines those scenes into new orders every time you press play.

It plays with the ideas of memory and truth.

Here's a clip of an unreleased Eno recording that's in the film called All I Remember.

I try to recall all the treasures I found in those days. Brian Eno has always been experimental.

He's worked with musicians like David Bowie.

He pioneered the genre of ambient music.

And John is very interested in experimentation.

He's our innovation editor,

and he writes a lot about new technologies and generative AI.

He wrote about this film in his recent column, and when I read it, it felt really like

finally a tangible example of the kinds of things that might be to come.

So for anyone who's also a little worried about how generative AI might affect art and

culture in the future.

John has kindly joined us today to talk through it.

John, hi, welcome to the show.

Hi, Lila.

Thanks for being here.

Okay, so why don't we start with this film?

The filmmaker said you saw one of 52 quintillion possible versions, is that right? Yeah, that's quite a lot, isn't it?

It seems like a lot. I don't even know what that number means.

...