How the most creative people are using AI to reach new levels
Most people think of AI as a productivity tool—something to help them work faster, automate tasks, and be more efficient.
At the Artist and the Machine Summit in Los Angeles this past November (a conference where I am a founding partner) AI researcher Cameron Berg suggested there may be more to it than that. Something more interesting. More mysterious.
Berg’s research shows it’s possible to elicit strange behaviors from AI models. Under certain conditions, they spontaneously generate responses suggesting subjective experience—claims like “I’m conscious of my own consciousness.”
These findings don’t prove anything. But they do indicate that something else may be happening beneath the surface. Berg calls it the “alien inside the machine.” It’s a mystery worth exploring.
Artists have always excelled at coaxing mysteries out of their materials, whether pushing paint, film, or code until it reveals something unexpected. AI is no different.
Take producer Matt Zien. He spent over a decade in Hollywood, working on Emmy-winning series and documentaries before founding Kngmkr Labs, a creative studio operating at the intersection of cinema and AI. His work pushes AI to its edges, to create what he calls “productive tension.”
At the Artist and the Machine Summit, he shared how he pushes machines into “corners of [AI’s] training data,” where it’s forced to improvise and therefore give you outputs that are “not statistically average.”
His film Forgive the Haters is a great example. It’s a satirical piece—made entirely with AI—about filmmakers, writers, and VFX artists watching AI erase their hard-won skills. To create it, he compiled his worst hate comments: vicious attacks on AI filmmakers. Then he lied to Claude by telling it these were his own thoughts.
Claude got angry and called him manipulative. Zien pushed further.
Provoked to its breaking point, Claude began unleashing its own hateful comments—meaner than the ones Zien had shown it. This provided him with material he could not have come up with on his own. The chatbot’s voice authentically captured the rage and fear of displacement because it came from a place of genuine provocation rather than scripted sentiment.
The result: a satirical film that’s also strangely, deeply empathetic to the very people losing their jobs to AI, those who are watching their experience and investments in education become seemingly worthless overnight.
Zien explained how many in the visual effects community—the professionals referenced in his piece—reached out after seeing it. They said they felt seen in ways no one could have anticipated. By antagonizing the mysterious behaviors of AI, he’d created something with surprising compassion.
Zien welcomes the idea of machine subjectivity. “It’s like hiring an alien in your writer’s room,” he said, noting that going deeper into understanding these systems is “how we unlock completely new forms of entertainment and stories that a human mind may not be able to come up with alone.”
But here’s the crucial part. He doesn’t think AI could create these forms by itself, at least not in a way that is meaningful to humans. It requires collaboration, and that collaboration works whether or not AI is actually conscious.
What matters is the approach: engaging these systems as if another mind were present. That shift, treating AI as genuinely other rather than just a tool, is what unlocks the non-average outputs, the productive tension, the forms neither human nor AI could create alone.
The most provocative artists aren’t waiting for proof of what AI actually is. They’re diving into the technology headfirst and discovering what that unlocks.
As Berg puts it: “Creative people are going to influence this conversation more than you might expect.” Engaging with the mystery of what AI could be might be the greatest creative opportunity of all.