A couple of weeks ago, I moderated a panel at the VRTO Spatial Media Conference at OCAD University about the evolution of value in the age of AI. One of my panelists was Anthea Foyer, who leads the Creative Technology Office at the City of Toronto. I found her ideas fascinating. Partly because I didn’t really know the City of Toronto had a Creative Technology Office. But mostly because of the way Anthea thinks about creativity, technology, and public life. She talked about embracing the weird, she talked about convening, and she talked about what happens when we stop treating AI as a force that is simply happening to artists and start asking how creative communities might actually help shape what comes next. So, obviously, I invited her onto the podcast. Anthea’s office supports Toronto’s creative technology sectors, including immersive media, video games, esports, and emerging forms of digital entertainment. She is also the city’s focal point for Toronto’s UNESCO City of Media Arts designation and a co-founder of Future Makers, a creative foresight initiative developed with Toronto Metropolitan University’s Creative School. What interested me most was how Anthea and her colleagues have changed the way they bring AI into conversations with creative people. When you invite people to an event about AI, she says, they often arrive with a position already formed. They’re excited. They’re angry. They’re worried. They’re skeptical. So instead, Future Makers began asking people to imagine the future of their creative industries. AI was still in the room. It just wasn’t always the headline. That shift opened up a much more interesting question: What kind of creative future do we actually want to make? In this conversation, we discuss: * Why conversations about AI become so polarized * What happens when artists actually get to touch and test the tools * The difference between art made by AI and art made by artists using AI * Whether algorithms are expanding creative possibility or making culture more homogenous * Why Toronto should make more room for the strange, experimental, and weird * The role cities can play in AI adoption * Why convening people across disciplines may be one of the most important things we can do right now One idea from Anthea that lingers with me: technology can start to feel like an inevitable force being done to us. But technology is something humans created. We can play with it and question it. We can decide where it belongs and where it doesn’t. We can advocate for different systems and regulations. We can bring different people into the conversation. And, maybe most importantly, we can keep making things. Anthea believes Toronto has a particularly interesting opportunity right now. We have creative people, researchers, universities, AI expertise, business leaders, and public institutions. Her argument is that we need to get more of those people into rooms together to convene, to connect, and to make more room for the weird. I hope you enjoy the conversation, and please share your thoughts in the comments. Subscribe to support THE GRAIN Listen, like, comment, and share THE GRAIN to join the conversation we need to be having about the pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creativity. You can watch this and other video episodes of THE GRAIN Podcast on YouTube. Subscribe to THE GRAIN Newsletter, for deep dives on how AI is impacting creative industries right now. Read more about THE GRAIN and our upcoming live events at thegrain.ai Reach me at ronit@thegrain.ai Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok Get full access to THE GRAIN with Ronit Novak at thegrainai.substack.com/subscribe
