What AI Will Do to Art

This story appears in the August 2026 print edition. While some stories from this issue are not yet available to read online, you can explore more from the magazine . Get our editors' guide to what matters in the world, delivered to your inbox every weekday. Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst believe the future doesn't have to belong to slop. The art was way too heavy. In mid-March, the artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst were preparing an installation to coincide with the Venice Biennale, the prestigious international art festival, but the execution was becoming tricky. They wanted to suspend sculptures of a trippy cityscape upside down from the ceiling of an 18th-century palazzo. But the construction material they envisioned-- 3-D-printed sand--would weigh tons, which was more than the antique building could bear. The sculptures, they realized, might fall and crush someone. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. This was a rather analog problem for a married couple widely seen as technological prophets. Herndon, 46, and Dryhurst, 41, have reached the upper echelons of the art world thanks to a media-spanning output--music, images, software, and reams of commentary--with a cybernetic bent. They are high culture's most influential exponents of artificial intelligence, an invention that many people believe spells doom for the arts but that they think could lead to a renaissance. I met them on a cold, bright Tuesday in Berlin.