How AI is changing art. Plus: winter cooking

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘How AI is changing art. Plus: winter cooking’

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m sitting in the studio and I’m looking at an image. My colleague Tom Faber made this image. You know the artist Damien Hirst, who created that piece that’s a shark suspended in formaldehyde. It’s kind of inspired by his work.

Tom Faber
This is my Damien Hirst sculpture of Winnie the Pooh.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, this is very good.

Tom Faber
Well, I just thought you could see these in a gallery.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, they’re just sort of like floating Winnie the Pooh’s. They do look like they’re kind of floating in formaldehyde, like the shark.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Tom’s our gaming critic. He writes a lot about technology and the future. And the trippy thing about this image is that it looks just like something Damien Hirst could have made, but he didn’t make it, and Tom didn’t either. The image was entirely auto-generated by artificial intelligence. Tom just typed a prompt into a website. It’s called Dall-E.

Tom Faber
The prompt says Damien Hirst, sculpture of Winnie the Pooh, cut in half, suspended in formaldehyde. It’s got almost all of that, but none of them are cut in half.

Lilah Raptopoulos
No, that’s a lot. You’re asking one thing too many from this thing. Dall-E is spelled D-A-L-L dash E. It’s a portmanteau of Wall-E, the Pixar robot, and Salvador Dali. And this software is part of a new trend in digital technology called AI-generated art. This program can create basically any picture based on any prompt.

Tom Faber
To literally pluck any random idea from your imagination and type it in and see it generated within 5-10 seconds. It feels a bit like magic. And the implications I feel like we’re only just beginning to untangle.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Today I speak to Tom about some of these implications. He wrote a cover story about this for FT Weekend magazine, and he thinks AI-generated art isn’t just a fun internet fad. He thinks it’s going to have a big impact on a lot of different creative fields. Then we talk about deep winter cooking. I’ve invited on the writers of our beloved Recipe column, Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packer. They are also known as Honey & Co. They give us a ton of ideas for comforting meals in the coldest months. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Tom, hi. Welcome back to the show.

Tom Faber
Hi, Lilah. It’s great to be back.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So we are here to talk about AI-generated art. Maybe a good place to start is: can you explain what AI-generated art is?

Tom Faber
Sure. The simplest way to explain it is AI generation tools. It’s a software that understands natural human language. So you type in a sentence, anything from your imagination, say a pig in the style of Van Gogh. And it should be able to create a relatively convincing approximation of that using a huge amount of images which have been scanned from the internet, which have all been processed through an algorithm and kind of spat back out at you. And it’s pretty impressive what it can do.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It is. Impressive is an understatement. It feels kind of like I’m living in the future when I use it. And the timing of this feels especially good because I keep seeing friends posting these AI-generated images on my social feeds. Where would our listeners have seen this?

Tom Faber
I think memes on social media were most people’s introduction to this technology. They definitely were for me. And I think a big pleasure of seeing this technology, which in many ways could be very transformative in the world of technology and the world of art has been the stupidity of some of the things that people have done with it. You know, everything from Jesus ordering a takeaway pizza. He chose pepperoni, it seems like, to Rubik’s cubes made of peanut butter and jelly. You know, the idea is that people have are hilarious and it’s been great fodder for memes.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
An important thing to keep in mind about AI programs like Dall-E is that they can generate any image. You could type in four-year-olds drawing of the Gettysburg Address, and it’ll show a clumsy crayon drawing of Abraham Lincoln at a podium. Or you could type in Queen Elizabeth shopping at Walmart in the style of Monet. That one’s actually pretty good. AI-generated art has been around for a while, but it’s only really managed to go mainstream in the past year. The thing that stuck out to me in your piece is that AI was struggling to generate a human face and now you’re saying you can create almost anything you ask it to. Like, it’s happened so fast. And here’s how it happened that fast.

Tom Faber
The technology has been bubbling away for a few years, so the first Dall-E was announced beginning of 2021, and it was just a kind of tech model. People weren’t allowed to access it. And then a year or so later, Dall-E 2 came around and that was the one that made the big splash because suddenly they were letting people use it. And the difference between the first and the second Dall-E was really striking as well. They trained the AI on a much, much larger data set of images, so its results were much, much more convincing.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
The images are so convincing that actually professional creatives have started using the software for a bunch of different tasks. Like, artists and architects use it to quickly visualise an idea. Or filmmakers will use it for mood boards. Graphic designers use it. In some ways it does a lot of work that we would normally pay artists and graphic designers for.

Tom Faber
So here’s one I just made today. This is Christmas cards with holly leaves and berries lino cut in the style of William Morris, who’s a British designer, artist, poet, very famous for his sort of recurring natural motifs used on wallpapers and all that sort of thing. And I really like William Morris’s style and I thought, could you make a Christmas card? And I think these look exactly like something he would have done.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Well, the cool thing here is like, okay, so I don’t know. I mean, like, if you are looking to create a Christmas card by yourself, but you have no artistic ability, but you kind of have a sense of what you want it to look like. These are kind of beautiful. Like you could really take this and and download it and then export it onto a Christmas card and have done a good job. But it wasn’t made by an artist. It was made by this algorithm.

Tom Faber
A hundred per cent. Yeah. One of the artists who I spoke to described it as, it’s like being the art director for a team of artists. So the vision and the editorial direction are yours, but the creation of the image is down to the app.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
So the natural next question is whether AI-generated art will put a lot of artists and designers out of work.

Tom Faber
A lot of what you hear of what gets the most volume is a sort of slightly hysterical reaction of, “Oh my God, this is going to replace artists and designers and everyone’s going to be out of a job and all hail all our robot overlords.” And I think emotionally, this is coming from a really understandable place. But I think the answer is a lot more complex than that. And there’s also lots of artists who are choosing instead of wholesale rejecting this technology, they’re saying, “Okay, well, actually I can use this as part of my practice. And if there are parts of it that I don’t think work or that I think are unethical, let’s try and fix those rather than let’s reject this wholesale.” Because it’s here like the Pandora’s box is opened. It’s not going to close again. You know, so let’s deal with it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So there’s, like, so many directions we could go. I kind of want us to focus on AI being used as an art form. And you said in your piece, which I really liked, that, like, every new technology has threatened to make the art forms before it feel irrelevant, but never really did, right? Like oil painting starting didn’t end drawing or like photography didn’t end painting. People still draw now. And so I’m curious about how you think AI, I mean, I doubt that it will make previous forms, like, irrelevant or obsolete, but how it might change art going forward.

Tom Faber
I think what excites me is that it’s very hard to imagine how it’s going to change exactly, but we can be sure that it will change.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Tom Faber
I think of the technological revolutions in image-making that have preceded this. I think the one that is most instructive is the camera, probably. Because the camera was created by scientists as a way to sort of reflect the world around us. And then it got much better. The first Kodak camera made it sort of accessible to a mainstream audience, and then artists started sort of subverting the technology and using it for the purpose of creative expression. And now it exists as its own artistic discipline. So I think part of how artists use technology is in breaking it and then using it in ways that it’s not meant to be used. And I think that’s what we’re going to see happening with this. And I don’t know what’s coming, but I’m very excited to see it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. And it asks some of the same questions. I mean, when the camera was invented, it was, there was sort of this question like, well, the artist didn’t create all of the things within the piece of art, right? It’s like a depiction of what they’re seeing. So is it less like art? And there are some underlying questions here about, like, if a machine is helping you make art, is it less of yours?

Tom Faber
Well, I mean. But that conversation’s not new, is it?

Lilah Raptopoulos
No, not at all.

Tom Faber
It’s been decades that we’ve been going to art galleries and looking at artworks which were made by an artist’s team; which were made by machines; which were, you know, a urinal that an artist took and wrote his name on.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I mean, even Rafael and Da Vinci had apprentices painting for them.

Tom Faber
Right. Exactly. Just like Jeff Koons does. I think the idea that the quality of an artwork is defined by how much time went into making it or how much skill went into making it, I think it’s an old narrative, and I think it’s already being displaced. And I think this technology would just accelerate that displacement. And I certainly don’t think that art will be any the worse.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Okay. So Tom, it sounds like we are just scratching the surface on how we can use this tool. And also computer scientists that you spoke with think that it’s going to be very common and pretty mainstream very soon. So I’m just curious about the short term, like where is this going in the near future?

Tom Faber
Two things are basically already possible, but it’s just a question of the computing power. One is to create 3D models using AI image, using AI generation. So that would be things that you could use in making special effects for a movie, making a video game, architect’s models. 3D is one. The other is video. Very soon these, you’ll be able to use these tools to say, make a five-minute film introducing a foreigner to Miami Beach or something.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Could you say, like, in the style of Steven Spielberg?

Tom Faber
You could. And I don’t know if it would be great at the beginning, but it will get better.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Tom Faber
I think it’s quite an interesting moment for AI image generation because although yeah, we’re seeing those AI-generated avatars all across social media, the hype cycle has slightly moved on. Specifically from Dall-E, the circling media vultures like myself have sort of moved on a bit. And now it’s like, okay, let the tech guys and the artists duke it out. Like, what’s this actually going to be? Fascinating to see.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. And is this just sort of like a fun fad of something that we just play with for a couple of months? Or does it have the lasting power that that it seems to that it could?

Tom Fabe
No, I’m not uncertain about that. This is not a fad. No. Like, I think it’s really instructive to compare this to NFTs, like, or to crypto, which is this technology, which there was a lot of buzz around and a lot of investment in. The people are always a bit like, yeah, but what do you actually do with it? Like, how would I actually use this in my day to day life? This is very different because since this technology came into existence, millions of people have organically found uses for it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Tom Faber
Everyone who you talk to is like, Oh yeah, I’ve been using this to do X, Y and Z. And I was like, Oh God, I was only doing A, B, C. I never even thought of X, Y, Z, you know? And this is happening all the time. So I really don’t think it’s a fad.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow! Okay, Tom, come back in a year and let’s talk about where it is and...

Tom Faber
Sure

Lilah Raptopoulos
And whether it happened. Thank you so much. This is so fascinating.

Tom Faber
That’s a pleasure. I would happily talk about this forever.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s officially deep winter in the northern hemisphere. In dating, they call that “cuffing season”. But in my home, it’s cookbook season. It’s cooking season. It’s that time that you turn on your oven and you slow roast something all day, or that you do a very time-consuming project like make many pounds of marmalade. There’s just something very primal about hunkering down and starting a fire and feeding. Of course, the thing you want to be making depends on who you are.

Itamar Srulovich
I love soup. Sarit doesn’t so much, but I can eat soup all day, three times a day. I think it’s the most comforting thing.

Sarit Packer
Oh no, he’s saying all the wrong things.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packer. They’re the London-based chefs behind Honey & Co. The Honeys run some of the most beloved Middle Eastern spots in London a restaurant, a grill house and a gourmet shop. And Itamar and Sarit are both business partners and also married. When you go to Honey & Co, it really feels extraordinarily comforting. It’s like you’re eating the best version of a homecooked meal. They have dips and breads and sides and stews that fall off the bone, Tagines. So needless to say, there is nobody better to talk to you about winter cooking. Itamar and Sarit, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.

Itamar Srulovich
Thank you for having us. It’s always a pleasure.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I am thrilled to have you both on. You write one of my favourite columns at the FT, our Recipe column. And you’re just, one of my favourite things about your recipes is that you’re just so good at flavour and texture and making cooking fun. And today I’m hoping we can talk about cooking through these dark winter months that we’re entering.

Sarit Packer
Yeah, it’s the best cooking time.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It really is. So to get into it, like, what would you say big picture is your overall approach to winter cooking?

Itamar Srulovich
I think the key to sort of winter cooking and, you know, again, that’s not, Sarit is going to argue, but I adore leftovers. I love leftovers. Like, I would cook something in, I don’t know, November and all the way until March. I will just have like, leftovers and leftovers and leftovers. I’ll have, like, a little stock leftover from something. I’ll make a soup. And from that soup, I’ll make a risotto. And from that risotto. I’ll make some rice cakes. I don’t know. I just want to continue the same meal for three months.

Sarit Packer
No, I absolutely disagree.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Sarit doesn’t agree?

Sarit Packer
No, I disagree on so many levels with that. But it’s good. It’s a good deal. If I overcook, then he’ll have it for lunch the next day, and I just will have something fresh for dinner. I mean, I love winter food. We cook a lot of kind of slow cooked dishes, where a piece of meat on a bone, some kind of pulses or lentils or any kind of root vegetables and just nice and slow until everything melts together. And it’s kind of absolutely delicious. And the meat just pulls off the fork.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
As you can tell, the Honeys don’t always agree on everything, but that really works for them. Business is good. It’s booming. Let me indulge Itamar with follow-up questions about soup if that’s okay. I find that it’s very easy to make, like, a fine soup. Like an okay soup. I’m curious what, if you have any sort of secrets to making an exceptional, flavourful, like, deep soup, as opposed to a, meh, it’s okay, kind of a soup.

Itamar Srulovich
Okay. Yeah. I think for the longest time, even as a professional chef, I didn’t know how to make good soup. Like, there is a knack to it. it’s an act of balance, because soup needs to be on one hand it needs to be interesting enough for an entire bowl. You know what I mean? It can’t be same-y. Yeah. So it needs to have, like, layers of flavour.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm hmm. And how do you create layers of flavour in a soup as opposed to a sauce? Is it similar?

Itamar Srulovich
Well, I think you need to, you need to have a good base. Like, you need to start with a really good base of soup. So if you, if you’re using, like, so often, you’d use sort of the holy trinity: onion, carrots, celery. But you really want to cook it so slow.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I also do want to ask you about meat. So you mentioned sort of having like a, maybe like a shank that falls off the bone. Can you tell me briefly about how to do that right?

Sarit Packer
Sure. So a bone is just very nice for cooking slow because there’s so much flavour.

Itamar Srulovich
Cooking on the bone is so important.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s just better.

Sarit Packer
Yeah, so much better. But you start with a piece of meat. It can also be just like a dice of something. I would make sure it’s got some fat to it. It can’t really, you can’t really use a lean piece. That’s not the, it’s not the point of a stew, really. So a nice fatty bit. Ideally on a bone. Brown it a bit, take it out then a whole load of vegetables. Like the trinity of the celery, carrot, onion, that carries you through so many good things. But also dried mushrooms is good. Little shallots, you know, the little kind of small onions that are really nice. Obviously whole garlic cloves, anything like that.

Itamar Srulovich
I was going to say, yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
The other thing I, it is my genetic obligation to ask you about is stuffed cabbage. You have this incredible recipe for stuffed cabbage on the FT stuffed with beef and rice and prunes. And I mean so many cultures, Middle Eastern cultures, but across the board have vegetables stuffed with meat and rice. And stuffed cabbages are like my favourite food. My grandmothers both made it. My Armenian grandmother made it, my great grandmother made it. And it epitomises, like, that cosy winterness to me.

Itamar Srulovich
And yeah, this is what I’m thinking. You know, it’s like you said, so many of these cultures with the stuffed vegetables. But it seems like that if you grew up having it just touches a certain bone. This is food that is very caring, you know, it’s very handy. You know, someone took a long time to make it and much care and attention to make it. You know, at least sort of once a year we take the time to do vine leaves or to stuff, you know, the cabbage and things like that. And yeah, and do it as a specialty just to keep to keep it going.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Sarit Packer
Yeah, I agree. It’s about taking the time and, like, really paying attention and it’s nice to do it properly.

Itamar Srulovich
This is winter food for me, but also, I want to say winter salads. Let’s take a moment for them.

Lilah Raptopoulos
We should.

Itamar Srulovich
Like normally you’d think salads is like the summer vegetables, tomatoes and cucumbers. But winter has all the beautiful bitter leaves and lettuces that are super fresh, refreshing and crunchy. And and of course, let’s not forget citrus fruit.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes. Could you give me a like, what would be a salad that you would whip up? You go to the farmer’s market and they have these sort of winter root vegetables and bitter leaves.

Itamar Srulovich
And yeah, so we kind of. We can be a little bit chef-y about it. You get like all of the beautiful winter vegetables, the root vegetables, even simple things like carrots, celeriac, you know, all of the different turnips and radishes that come up in the winter. Just sort of slice them as soon as you can. Sprinkle them with salt just to soften them a little bit, then dress that with a little bit of lemon or orange juice or clementine juice. And it’s just, you know exactly what you need and the size of that really brands to.

Lilah Raptopoulos
There is one more thing I wanted from Sarita and Itamar before I let them go. I wanted inspiration.

What sort of energy do you you know, some people, they cook every night. They have to cook for their family every night. They have to cook for themselves every night. They’re getting a little bit bored by it or tired of it. How do you recommend bringing, like, excitement into the process of cooking again?

Sarit Packer
I have a weird kind of thing where I like to, it’s like a fetish. I like to finish things that are in the cupboard, you know, Itamar thinks its very funny. But I hate it if I have a bottle of something that I bought because I was trying one kind of, I don’t know, yeah, let’s say one kind of Japanese recipe, and I bought something.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Sarit Packer
So then I’ll look at this bottle and think, okay, I have to like, think what I’m going to make that is going to use this bottle. Like, sometimes it’s just about like looking at what you have in the house and saying, oh, I haven’t used this for ages, maybe I should make something.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, that’s a really good structuring kind of agent. Itamar and Sarit, thank you so much. This is very inspiring and please come back again.

Sarit Packer
We would love to.

Itamar Srulovich
It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for having us. We’re so hungry now.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So hungry.

Sarit Packer
We’re gonna have dinner straight away.

Itamar Srulovich
We’re going to have stuffed cabbage.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Perfect.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
I have put some of my favourite Honey & Co winter recipes in the show notes, including one that just came out: a tomato and rice soup. It’s one of Itamar’s favourites. I’ve also included the names of their cookbooks.

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That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the podcast from the Financial Times. Next week, my colleague Claire Bushey joins us. Claire recently had treatment for breast cancer and she looked into how much the American healthcare system considered her life to be worth in dollars and cents. Then we are talking about Meghan and Harry and Harry’s new memoir, Spare, with Henry Mance. Don’t fight it. We’re going there. It’s going to be fun. If you want to say hi, we love hearing from you. You can email us at FTWeekendpodcast@FT.com. The show is on Twitter at @FTWeekendpod, and I am on Instagram and Twitter @LilahRap. I post a lot about culture and our episodes on my Instagram. Links to everything mentioned today are in the show notes alongside a link to the best offers available on a subscription to the FT, including a really good deal and a print offer. I really like that one. Those offers are at FT.com/weekendpodcast. Make sure to use that link. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smith is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco. With original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer. And special thanks, as always, go to Cheryl Brumley. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.