Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst introduced protocol art, a practice that shapes the rules of media and technology before they influence culture. Their work explores AI, data ownership, and digital identity, advocating for ethical, artist-led interventions. They highlighted projects like Holly+, a voice model ensuring consent and revenue sharing, Spawning, a tool for artists to opt out of AI training, and 'The Call', a Serpentine Gallery exhibition treating AI model training as an artistic process. Their Public Diffusion model, built solely on public domain data, challenges mass data scraping in AI. The artists stressed that all media is now training data and urged artists to actively shape AI’s future. Their work bridges art, technology, and policy, influencing AI ethics discussions at the governmental level.
“If artists are going to have any agency in the future, they need to stop reacting to technology and start shaping it.”
— Mat Dryhurst
