With striking Hollywood actors and AI-generated artworks winning art competitions, the question of whether machines are going to take over artmaking is a hot topic. Musician Herndon and artist partner Dryhust have been ahead of that particular question for years; Herndon’s clear-sighted experiments into AI songmaking resulted in Holly+, her ‘digital twin’, who can reshape existing songs in Herndon’s own voice. (Herndon is also on the 2024 jury for the Paris-based IRCAM’s prestigious Generative Music Prize.) As the implications of AI learning from art made by humans become clearer, the pair have been vocal advocates of artists’ rights; in March their online tool – allowing artists to check if their work has been used to train AI models, and opt out – attracted 40,000 signatories, with several AI companies agreeing to respect artists’ wishes, including Stability AI. It’s no wonder that Herndon made Time magazine’s ‘100 AI’ list in September. As Dryhurst told Freethink magazine, ‘I don’t see any conflict between being very, very excited about… machine learning, and also being very loyal to or concerned about artist welfare’.