USV on AI Aesthetics
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USV on AI Aesthetics
What happens when "hallucination as a feature, not a bug" is taken to the ultimate extreme of art?
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsWritten by: Matt Mandel
Translated by: DAOSquare
The word “technology” comes from the Greek techne, meaning an art, skill, or craft. Plato wrote extensively about this concept, often citing artists like flute players as prototypical examples of those engaged in techne. Although today we tend to contrast technology and art (e.g., STEM vs. the humanities), classical thinkers saw them as deeply intertwined. To understand this connection, one must recognize that art is not, and never has been, merely self-expression. Crucially, art is always mediated through the tools we use to communicate, and the nature of these tools is determined by the technological capabilities of the time.
Over the past 25 years, tech companies like Netflix, YouTube, and TikTok may appear to be simply new channels for media distribution. But that’s a mistaken way of thinking about them. New technologies unlock entirely new forms of art. By changing the medium through which we express ourselves, they alter who can create art and what counts as an artistic work. Streaming changed the pacing of television, as audiences now binge content rather than parcel it out over weeks and months. More dramatically, if you had shown someone a MrBeast YouTube video or a Savanah Moss TikTok 25 years ago, they might not have even had a conceptual framework to understand what they were looking at.
Artificial intelligence may be the most important technology of our era, and like previous technological revolutions, it will transform our relationship with art—how we create it, what kind of art we make, and even what we consider art in the first place.
First, we’ve already seen AI lower the barriers to artistic creation. On my personal blog, I now add custom images to every new post—something I simply could not do without image models. Runway enabled USV’s OG Matt to produce an amazing trailer. Music apps like Splice and Suno mean that people without formal musical training can easily express themselves through songs—not just through curation, but through creation. If the iPhone meant anyone could capture reality with a camera in their pocket, then AI means anyone can depict and interpret reality using any medium of their choice.
AI will also unlock entirely new art forms. Plots is creating a new mode of storytelling—an AI chatbot with characters whose narrative paths can be shaped by humans. A company we’ve invested in, Bright Moments, developed the “Dream Machine,” which continuously generates new images based on prior outputs and voice prompts from users (or should I say creators? Or consumers?). We installed one in the USV office, and we’ve had endless fun with it! A defining feature of these new AI mediums is interactivity and randomness—qualities we might typically associate with games. Humans provide vision, are surprised and delighted by what emerges, and respond in turn with new prompts, further expanding the boundaries of the experience.
Perhaps most intriguingly, we’ll see art emerge primarily inspired by AI itself (rather than more deliberate human prompting). This third category differs only subtly from the second, but projects like Nothing Forever and AI Tube feel less like AI-enabled creations and more like creations driven by AI. If YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok reflect the deepest aspects of human experience by revealing the most mundane details of individual lives, are we now discovering unknown parts of ourselves through less constrained processes of co-creation with AI? What happens when “hallucination as a feature, not a bug” is taken to the ultimate endpoint of art?
I’m excited about these new artistic methods. They’ll be strange—just as Rambalac is strange. Or, as Damien Chazelle illustrated in his masterpiece Babylon, from the perspective of early Hollywood, The Wizard of Oz, Jurassic Park, and Avatar all seemed strange too.
But how wonderful they are!
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