Last fall, the artist and musician Holly Herndon visited Torreciudad, a shrine to the Virgin Mary associated with the controversial Catholic group Opus Dei, in Aragón, Spain. The sanctuary, built in the nineteen-seventies, sits on a cliff overlooking an inviting blue reservoir, in a remote area just south of the Pyrenees. Herndon and her husband, Mathew Dryhurst, had been on a short vacation in the mountains nearby. They were particularly taken with an exhibit of Virgin Mary iconography from around the world: a faceless, abstract stone carving from Cameroon; a pale, blue-eyed statuette from Ecuador; a Black Mary from Senegal, dressed in an ornate gown of blue and gold. Moving from art work to art work, the couple discussed Mary's "embedding."

A.I. image generators are divisive. But few can deny that they have gotten really good. Within seconds, you can type in a prompt to make a photorealistic image of Donald Trump getting arrested or turn your strangest idea into something tangible. Over the coming years, A.I. companies will release even more advanced models that will remind us that this is just the beginning. At least one of these tools will be different in an important way: It will be prohibited from seeing 80 million of the images that helped teach its predecessors to draw and paint.

Last November, at the Stockholm University of the Arts, a human and an AI made music together. The performance began with musician David Dolan playing a grand piano into a microphone. As he played, a computer system, designed and overseen by composer and Kingston University researcher Oded Ben-Tal, "listened" to the piece, extracting data on pitch, rhythm, and timbre. Then, it added its own accompaniment, improvising just like a person would. Some sounds were transformations of Dolan's piano; some were new sounds synthesized on the fly.

Holly Herndon, the self-described "computer musician," swears her latest creation--an AI-powered vocal clone that is, at least theoretically, infinitely capable--was not made with the intent of freaking anyone out. "Definitely not," Herndon says on a call from her home in Berlin, laughing. "I'm trying to do the opposite." Named Holly, the vocal clone sings in Herndon's voice but can be prompted to sing anything. In a recent TED talk, Herndon displayed Holly singing songs in languages she doesn't speak.

Sorry, but not even Dolly Parton is sacred amid the encroachment of AI into art. Holly Herndon, an avant garde pop musician, has released a cover of Dolly Parton's beloved and frequently covered hit single, "Jolene." Except it's not really Herndon singing, but her digital deepfake twin known as Holly . The music video features a 3D avatar of Holly frolicking in what looks like a decaying digital world. And honestly, it's not bad -- dare we say, almost kind of good?

Sorry, but not even Dolly Parton is sacred amid the encroachment of AI into art. Holly Herndon, an avant garde pop musician, has released a cover of Dolly Parton's beloved and frequently covered hit single, "Jolene." Except it's not really Herndon singing, but her digital deepfake twin known as Holly . The music video features a 3D avatar of Holly frolicking in what looks like a decaying digital world. And honestly, it's not bad -- dare we say, almost kind of good?

Holly Herndon performs at TED2022: A New Era in April, 2022 in Vancouver, Canada. Holly Herndon performs at TED2022: A New Era in April, 2022 in Vancouver, Canada. Artist Holly Herndon created an AI clone of her voice that can sing in any languages and in any tone. In her music, Holly shows how AI can enhance the power and artistry of the voice. Holly Herndon is an American musical artist based in Berlin.

Despite the numerous AI platforms which serve up routes to auto-generate functional music, many artists who have overtly worked with AI have approached the concept via more individual means. Take Holly Herndon, the Berlin-based composer and musicologist who recently created her own intelligent musical accomplice. Dubbed'Spawn', this vocal-sample generator was taught by Herndon and partner Mat Dryhurst to reproduce a bank of vocal-types (including her own) via months of training its complex neural network. Spawn was able to organically add vocals to tracks presented to it. Though, as Herndon told Art in America, the process is still finding its feet: "AI is not that smart, it's very low fidelity, it's not real time, it's very slow and unwieldy. Spawn can take more than 24 hours to process someone's vocal input. On the other hand, it has some unique capabilities that are pretty exciting-slash-scary. The AI can extract the logic of something outside its operator's own logic and re-create it. This is entirely new for computer music."

If you have ever dreamed of earning money from a stellar music career but were concerned you had little talent, don't let that put you off - a man called Alex Mitchell might be able to help. Mr Mitchell is the founder and boss of a website and app called Boomy, which helps its users create their own songs using artificial intelligence (AI) software that does most of the heavy lifting. You choose from a number of genres, click on "create song", and the AI will compose one for you in less than 30 seconds. It swiftly picks the track's key, chords and melody. You can do things such as add or strip-out instruments, change the tempo, adjust the volumes, add echoes, make everything sound brighter or softer, and lay down some vocals.

More recently, in 2019, Berlin-based US electronic music composer, Holly Herndon, made an album called Proto in collaboration with an AI system called Spawn that she had co-created. Ms Herndon is an expert in this field, and has a doctorate in music and computing from Stanford University in the US.