Propaganda artist for the machine.
Agnieszka Pilat. Polish-American painter known for portraits of machines (Boston Dynamics' Spot among them) and for teaching robots to paint. Lives in Silicon Valley.
Pilat started painting human portraits in Silicon Valley and realised, in her words, that portraiture has always been a conversation about power structures, and that power in Silicon Valley had moved from humans to machines. So she started painting the machines as the new aristocracy. The criticism arrived later, once she also began teaching the machines to paint.
The most interesting thread is the texture of her working relationship with the technology companies. Engineers love what she does and are quietly generous with off-hours access. Business teams are nervous about it ("we told you not to bother engineering") and legal teams more nervous still, because corporate culture varies sharply on which kinds of art the company wants to be associated with. A portrait of Google X's Waymo lidar technology came back too dark for the CEO's taste, and never got shown. That single anecdote does more to explain corporate AI strategy than most public-facing keynotes manage.
She closes by previewing a robotics installation she will build for the Kennedy Center in Washington DC for the 250th anniversary of American independence. The through-line of her work, from Jacquard loom to punch card to neural net, is that we have been writing for machines since the 1800s and only recently remembered to ask what they should make.
The most cited episode for art-and-technology readers, and a good introduction to a guest whose Wikipedia profile is already richer than most of the people we will eventually interview.