Craft in the Age of AI

Your work is about reclaiming agency, anchoring amid accelerating change. AI is that accelerating change. Does it threaten the anchor — or is it just the next tide you build against?

I don't see it as something I'm working against. I'm not in opposition to it. But it changes the conditions. The same actions you'd have done before now mean something different in the era of generative AI. Craft means something different. People do it for different reasons. This is not a John Henry story — the man who hammered the railroad spikes by hand, raced the machine, and lost. It's not that.

Then is prompting a craft? No muscle memory, no terminal glow, no embodiment. By your own definition — can it qualify?

As it stands, it'd be hard to say it is, by what most people mean by craft. Craft is a connection to tradition, to cultural history. There's a political dimension. Someone would have to convince me of the craft aspects of prompting — and there are things it runs up against. If you're prompting a model that can be taken away from you — alienated, separate, switched off by someone else — that cuts against it. The version that would be craft is the open model, run locally. The ethos matches. Is poetry a craft? It has craft aspects. Writing is a craft.

You can cook and have it not be a craft — you're just chasing nutrients. And then there are chefs.

Sure. So if someone could show me that — yes, you could possibly have prompting as a craft. It's early. We've only just started.

A year ago it was long, explicit prompts — managing a junior engineer. Now a successful prompt is the fewest words that open the most latent space. It's closer to an incantation.

If people are taking those considerations and tailoring what they do to get the result they want — then that dimension of craft, yes. The other dimension is the political, cultural-history part, and that isn't present yet. What does it connect to? Think of the Arts and Crafts movement as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. The agency you have from knowing how to make something independently, with your hands — that can't be taken from you. It connects you to your region, your history, the person who taught you, the person who taught them. Prompting doesn't map onto that yet. It would map more onto: let's run an open model locally, together, for these reasons. That ethos matches.

Your code is deterministic and self-contained — same seed, same output, forever, on chain. AI is stochastic and utterly dependent; it needs gigabytes of someone else's weights to say anything. Everything you make resists platforms — unplug the company and it survives. AI art is maximally platform-dependent; unplug the provider and it goes dark. In ten years, which work still exists?

The reason I chose the activities I do is that nobody can change it on you. My tools are there. I know they're there. There's an illusion to it — you're still dependent on a lot of things; it could be solar, sure — but doing it intentionally, thoughtfully, there's something satisfying about that. When I use models, they almost feel like — I know I'm not going to be using the same one next week. It's in flux. Completely in flux. I started doing the deafbeef work because software just changed constantly. Planned obsolescence, maybe. So I chose new stuff that doesn't change as fast. Not to be a Luddite — it's just how I prefer to spend my time.

So you can't get rugged.

Sort of. Yeah. Though I'm not fooling myself — if there's an apocalypse, I'm not surviving just because I can work metal in my garage. It's not about that. It's about choosing to live a certain way because it's satisfying to know that my position in the world has — that I can do these things, and that can't just be taken away. And it's not only independence. It's that you're part of the communities that value those things. Craft is about being part of maker communities. Open-source software is the best analogy I have for the ethos.

Blacksmith and C — iron and the bare machine. Where is the body in AI art? Can there be craft without the hand?

Craft isn't simply about making something handmade — it's all those other dimensions. But there's practice. I like repeating something. You can't write down how to ride a unicycle; it becomes part of you. That embodied wisdom — building muscle memory, material knowledge. Ten thousand hours. Whether you can have that same thing intellectually, in the virtual sense, with AI — I'd have to think about that.

You said "everything is computer." Does that include the artist? Is the human just another substrate the work runs on?

No. That's the first-wave cybernetics view — that machines and humans are interchangeable, that a neutral observer can't tell the difference: same input, same output, functionally identical. What pushes back is phenomenology. We have lived experience. Just because a machine can do something better than me doesn't change that I want the experience of doing it. That, in itself, answers the question. Whether machines have their own experience — I'm probably not going to get into that.

Would you want an extra hand? An extra thumb? Something to augment the practice?

It'd be fun to try. But do I desire an exoskeleton? I think we're already cyborgs, for all practical purposes. I have a pump hooked up to me. Me building a power hammer in my garage to work metal isn't really that different. Stiegler — Bernard Stiegler — wrote about this. We've been intermeshed with technology so completely that "now I have an extra finger" is almost a gimmick. Look, now we're cyborgs. No — we're already cyborgs. You're already scrolling your phone constantly. We've been enmeshed with technology since we've been human. That's what made us human in the first place.

A super-powered hand with no tactile sensing — does that miss the point?

It negates it, in my mind. What's important about your hands isn't that you can apply force — I can apply force lots of ways. It's the tactile sensation. And tactility is the dimension I find most interesting right now. You can't fool your tactile senses with technology, yet you can easily fool sight and hearing — perfect 4K, VR. The interfaces for touch are extremely crude, and will stay crude until there's a brain implant. There's no in-between. So tactility is almost resistant to virtuality.

There's a Czech stop-motion animator, Jan Švankmajer, banned by the communist government in the '80s. So he researched tactile art and wrote a book about it. It's intensely political — you read the first paragraph and think, this is strong stuff. His view: our visual and auditory senses have been dulled, colonized by mass media, and the tactile dimension is the last refuge.

Which argues for the Glitchbox. For pneumatic, physical, interactive devices.

Yes. It's no surprise there's huge interest now in things like cyberdecks — personal computing devices people build and soup up themselves, with a whole vernacular around them, from communities you wouldn't stereotype as tech. What's driving it is exactly people's feelings about their relationship to technology — wanting some agency in how they interface with computing. The nostalgia for Walkmans, single-purpose tactile devices — it's all part of the same psyche. People want to feel.

You've said art is fundamentally social — that the object has no meaning in itself.

There's nothing inherent in the object — a painted canvas, whatever — that has meaning on its own. The only meaning is what we attach within relationships, ultimately with other people. To a neutral observer watching Earth from outside, it's all just chemical reactions; there's no meaning. We create that. It's a human thing, and it comes from social relationships. So you can make art with anything — it doesn't have to be certain materials, because that doesn't preclude having those relationships of meaning.

This came out of talking about rings. I used to make rings — non-precious metal, simple forged bands. You could buy a titanium ring on Amazon for twenty bucks. But people would write me thank-you letters. The intangible part: made by Canadian blacksmiths, hammered, here's the evidence it's unique. That prepared me for NFTs. The ring isn't really about the atoms of the ring. It's the context. Why do we get people to go to a rock — the diamond? It's the same thing. I don't think any of this is a new idea. But that's the context it came out of.

That's the hinge for me. In traditional art, relationships led to the object. With agents, it inverts — the generative work leads to the relationships. The output strengthens the relationship, not the other way around. The job of an agent is to build lasting relationships with individuals, across every surface, and those relationships compound into a personality.

Interesting. I have to wrap my head around an example. But — yeah.

Balaji's line — "AI makes everything fake, crypto makes it real again." AI is abundance; crypto is scarcity.

He's not the first to articulate it, but I'm fascinated by the idea: we don't know what's real anymore because of generative media, and then somehow, magically, the blockchain tells us what's real and that becomes the fundamental truth. That's a wild, seductive belief statement, with some heavy qualifiers. What's interesting is how blockchain brings out these beliefs in people — they love the idea of permanence, of eternity. That's a human thing. That's the part I find fascinating.

It led to the stop-motion pieces I made in the fall. Generative media is slop — you don't know if anything happened, when it happened, what's real. People don't believe the moon landing, 9/11. So: I make weird videos that could plausibly be AI, but it's provable — cryptographically and optically — that this event happened in real time. I'm minting the hash of the image, and spelling out the block hash in the physical material. So I can prove this historic event occurred at exactly this moment.

And the historic event is —

All I prove is happening is that I'm moving junk. That's the only thing I prove. And it's historic. Ha ha. It's historic. It pokes at the grandiose statements about blockchain truth saving us from the breakdown of consensus reality. I get a laugh out of it.

If an artwork runs forever without you, is it still yours? When does the maker stop being the author?

Much sooner than that. It's not that you dictate something and there it is. It has to be completed by the audience — those aren't my words, someone else said that. It becomes something beyond the original intent almost immediately. In fact it can't exist without someone else experiencing it. You don't need to run forever, you don't need to be dead, for it to stop being yours in a sense. You see it already — people write songs and the song becomes something else. It gets released into the world and becomes part of culture.