C is the artist who's planning to go beyond music into ventures involving education, AI, and a book called Transhumanism for Babies. C is the sometime paramour of Elon Musk (exact terms of that relationship tend to oscillate) and co-parent of two kids. C has tattoos on her fingers underneath multiple metal rings, and what looks like a spiderweb tattoo on her right ear. C wants to die on Mars, or maybe an exoplanet-unless her kids, X and Y, want her to help out with the grandchildren. C is frank, funny, and a little worried that she's not getting her points across. C doesn't have to worry about that-communication, after all, is what she (and Grimes) are very, very good at.
And there was a lot to communicate. Frankly, I was wondering whether c and I would get along. I'm a baby boomer who mainlined Dylan, and she's a 35-year-old, laptop-oriented songcrafter, a polarizing social media icon, and a wary celebrity who sometimes shines in the glare of her partner's outsize fame and other times is understandably insistent on privacy. When I told my millennial son that I was interviewing her, he questioned her relevance. And why, of all people, was I doing the interview?
But we connected easily because she's one of the most WIRED people imaginable. Her songs draw on the cyberpunk heroism celebrated in our pages and pixels. She's obsessed with Dune. Her belief that tech can save us maps to the often rosy outlook that has brought attention and scorn to our brand. And few things are more WIRED than her current project: providing a platform for wannabe Grimeses to, through the magic of AI, swap their voices for hers when they write and perform tunes. All without copyright concerns. (If you commercialize the tunes, she gets half.) Naysayers point out that it's easier for the underground-ish Grimes to pull off such a move than, say, Beyoncé. Even her manager told Rolling Stone that "you don't hear Grimes that much anyway." But for a legit musical artist-she's headlining with the Cure at a couple of concerts later this year-it's a bold move, reflecting her impulse to embrace the future.
As the afternoon drew down, the four of us talked about AI, music, art, motherhood, and Mr. Musk. Though c, or Grimes, or Claire, is an admitted troll, she beamed with optimism and sincerity, only occasionally skirting details by invoking some mysterious NDA. The interview is edited for length and clarity.
STEVEN LEVY: You're letting other people use your voice for their musical compositions-open sourced yourself, as you put it.
C: And open sourced my IP. And kind of my whole identity.
Why do that?
I've always been more of a producer and engineer. I'm not a naturally great singer, and I'm pretty shy. At the beginning of my career, I tried to find a singer/front person, but no one was going to do that for a tiny indie artist in Montreal. The most rewarding creative times are when I'm able to work with other artists, especially other female artists. I can focus on everything else. Whereas if I'm performing, I'm getting pulled everywhere, and I'm stressed about my voice. So when the voice emulators started coming out, and there was that thing with Drake and the Weeknd, I saw that people were striking them down.
You're referring to the unauthorized, Al-generated tune that synthesized the voices of those artists. Clearly you are not in a panic about lending your voice to the rabble.
If anyone makes a good Grimes song, they can do it as me.
What have the results been like?
There's some good stuff. Two in particular were very, very good. They're so in line with what my new album might be like that it was sort of disturbing. It's like, "Who am I, and what am I here for?" On the other hand, it's like, "Oh, sick, I might get to live forever." I'm into self-replication. I don't know if you've read much about self-replicating AI, like robots or anything.
I wrote a book about it.
I'd love to read it. I just started researching this in earnest a couple days ago.
So this open sourced voice thing is about literally replicating yourself?
That would be the dream. A self-replicating pop star.
Once you've replicated your musical self, do you just go off and do other things?
Yes, I can do more of my schemes. I've got two projects I'm getting into right now. One is like the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer-I'm really into education.
I take it you're riffing on Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age.
Yeah, Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson kind of vibes. This is a baseline, entry-level educational project for me. I have a friend who I think I'm going to work with to develop something like a toy that can talk to you, like in Toy Story.
You're describing a ChatGPT companion.
Yeah, you're like, "Hey, what's the deal with volcanoes?" And it tells you, "This is what a volcano is." But it's more. It's got a personality. A pretty well-trained personality.
Sounds like Chucky.
I guess it could go awry. But in the short term it's actually pretty safe. I think a lot about the fertility crisis and low birth rates. If you can make life a lot easier for moms, maybe that would help. People get really scared to have AI companions for their kids, but it could be great for my kids to be talking to someone all day, as opposed to watching a screen.
I'm sure you'll see stuff like that coming up pretty soon.
I think a lot of smart people are working on this. I've met a lot of them, actually.
I bet. What's it been like immersing yourself in tech culture?
I've never met so many amazing people. It's like my social fabric is getting super shaken. And it's making me more ambitious. Also, I feel like I'm sort of at the end of music. When I first got into it, it was like the music-tech singularity. I'm working at home on my laptop, I can suddenly make songs. Every month there were new plug-ins, new cool stuff. It was this amazing renaissance period. But in the past couple of years, things have been slowing down.
On to Al, then?
I do think AI is gonna be the next thing. I have a lot of opinions about how it should be pursued. So another reason I'm here [in San Francisco] is that I'm trying to meet with all the people making generative AI music to try to convince them to do things in ways that are safe for the human psyche.
They're doing unsafe things to the human psyche?
Not necessarily. We should go to the edge of creativity. But I think we should do it very carefully. The thing that freaks me out is that AI can remove incentives for learning. LLMs are great, but I would maybe only have them in school. Is that something that I want my kids to have access to 100 percent of the time? Probably not. I want them to learn how to write; we are in a bit of a literacy crisis. That worries me a lot. Maybe that makes me sound old. But being able to read and write well deeply impacts the way you think.
Not surprisingly, I agree. I have been wondering-can an Al-generated piece of music have soul?
Yes. I signed an NDA, so I'm not allowed to say, but I've seen things that have extremely blown me away. I do worry about the future of art a bit. I think future cities will have low-tech zones, or low-tech schools, and there'll be boutique analog artists.
Would you spend time in a low-tech zone?
I like the high-tech zone. I'm a very pro-adventure person.
I never would have guessed.
I get my joie de vivre from exciting, novel things and experimenting and exploring.
If you had an opportunity to go back to, like, any recording session ever, what would you choose?
I would go see Beethoven. But that's not a recording session. I'd try to check if Beethoven was actually deaf. But the Ninth, that'd be sick. That's what I like. I know it's basic, but I love, love Vivaldi's Four Seasons. So I'd probably go see that, I guess. Also, I think I could be wrong about this. But Vivaldi was at a school for girls, writing all this music and getting 10-year-old girls to play it. I like the idea. It seems so aesthetically ridiculous.
How about films, are you interested in that?
I think cinema is still the best art form, although games can be up there. I do want to make films. A Midsummer Night's Dream update would be so sick. It maps on to AI really well-what if the fairies were actually made of artificial intelligence?
What other themes would you look at?
I'm obsessed with inaccurate historical text. The past: years of my life have been super bananas crazy, but not manner that I can publicly speak about. So I want to w the Icelandic saga version of my life-a super over-the-t magical, inaccurate version, like a historical text based a true story.
Like Sofia Coppola did with Marie Antoinette?
I'd be even more bananas than that.
I want to get to that bananas life ...
I've got NDAs. It's hard to talk about things very explic without saying things about other people's lives who very private.
Well, I do want to ask about Elon.
You get one Elon question.
We'll see. But here's a question. Both of you are super unique people. I'm curious what you learned from him. And what he learned from you.
I learned from him, like, the best internship ever. People don't like talking about Elon, but it was incredible to be right there watching all that SpaceX stuff happen. That's a master class in leadership and engineering and makes you understand how rare it is to have a leader of that quality.
And Twitter?
I know, the stuff on Twitter doesn't make it look like that. He didn't build the culture there. And the cultural fit has obviously been very intense. He holds his people to really high standards. Watching him, I understand how difficult it is to be a great general and do something of that magnitude. Elon has an old-world kind of discipline I really respect. And I think it rubs a lot of people the wrong way. They don't want to be in that hardcore zone. If you're not consenting to being in that hardcore zone, I get it. But he's challenged me a lot. I learned a lot about running my own team and my own life. I'm now way tougher and smarter than I used to be.
What did he learn from you?
Maybe to have more fun. I try to soften him up, to build family culture. And he steals a lot of my memes.
It's fascinating that Elon is taking your 3-year-old son, who you call X, to business meetings and other activities. There's a weird kind of protégé thing going on, right?
I'm here for that. X knows a lot about rockets. It's crazy. He knows more about rockets than me.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1450523853/1692000846/articles/FPnP768K91692178108943/6f6RVjkpt1692178510511.jpg]
He's a rocket scientist!
We had to stop giving him toys, because if they're not anatomically correct, he gets upset. He's a little engineer, for sure. But his obsession with space is bordering on, "Is this healthy?" When X saw Starship blow up, he had, like, a threeday PTSD meltdown. Every hour, he was waking up and going, "Starship..." and I had to rub his back.
And your daughter... Y, is it?
Yeah, she's a little engineer too. She likes industrial shipping. She's very strange.
How has motherhood changed you?
Motherhood made me a lot more optimistic. I was not super focused before. It was just, what sounds cool, what feels cool. Now I feel a social responsibility with my art-to make future-optimistic art. Not a lot of people are doing that. People have a very dire vision of the future, because it's easy and fun to write about cyberpunk dystopias. So seeing my kids makes me pathologically optimistic. It's a life mission.
Their father is the richest man in the world. Do you worry about privilege?
A little bit. I think their life is gonna be pretty intense. Being Elon's kid is not the same as being anyone's kid. In my house, at least, I want it to be more of a crazy warehouse situation and a cool art space.
You mentioned Twitter. Did you call out to Elon that you were disturbed by some of his tweets?
I don't want to talk about this too much. But take the trans thing. After that, we had a big, long conversation. I was like, "I want to dissect why you're so stressed about this." Getting to the heart of what Elon says helps me get to the heart of what other people's issues are, because it's this über guy situation. And it came down to pretty much every way that you transition can cause fertility issues. I was like, OK, you don't hate trans people, you hate woke culture. I get that it can be annoying, and you have concerns about the fertility thing. So let's figure it out, because there's a lot of fertility tech that could be innovated that would help trans people have kids, which would be great and would solve a lot of problems. He's just on Twitter, and he's unhappy with woke people, and the arguments happened.
Aren't you a woke person?
Probably not. I don't know what the term means. I think we need to change the discourse. The more people you can convince that this dichotomy is silly, and an out-of-date fight, the better. The root cause of this is people not resolving mental health stuff the right way. And not educating people on screen time where they get hooked on dopamine spikes.
Says a video game lover.
Social media is gonna spike your dopamine way more than a video game-and always in a negative way. Video games are still adventure. They're artistic, creative, and truly social. They're fulfilling some ancient thing that people need. Social media is optimized to spike your adrenals with monkey fear. It's like, "Oh no, am I gonna get kicked out of the tribe?" Do you get that way on social media? Less so now. I've gotten in trouble enough times that I don't get the adrenal response. The last few times I got, quote-unquote, canceled, I didn't even notice. It took me probably a year and a half to regulate my nervous system to that level of chaos.
Do you consider yourself a transgressive person?
Probably. But respectfully so. I want to respect everyone's space.
Were you that way as a kid?
I was. I went to Catholic school, and I remember pretending to be possessed by the devil and stuff.
How did that play?
I got in trouble. A lot. Being a troll is in my nature.
Were you ever seriously into drugs?
I don't really get addicted to things. But I was not a well-behaved kid. I did LSD for the first time when I was, like, 13.
What did you get from that?
I saw the grid on everything. It gave me this incredible sense of physics. After I did it once, I could just draw anything from memory in my mind from different angles.
In school, you studied neuroscience?
Yeah, lately I've wanted to finish my degree. I am tempted to go back to school and get into helping create systems that allow us to be better adapted to tech, or tech better adapted to us. So that we can be more mentally stable as we accelerate into the future.
Are you drawn to the brain-machine interface stuff?
I'm so into it. I think that's really the future. I'm very into accelerating human potential alongside AI. For people who want it.
Would you volunteer to have your brain wired with Elon's Neuralink?
Probably. I'd want a certain number of people to do that first.
Do you want to go to space?
Definitely. I hope to die in space.
What do you mean?
I would like to go far enough out there to where my body could not handle coming back. So it would be closer to the end of my life. Maybe 65.
By out there do you mean Mars?
Mars would be great. I hope there's a megastructure by then because I would love to see one in space. I'd go out there and live as long as I can until I di...
And there was a lot to communicate. Frankly, I was wondering whether c and I would get along. I'm a baby boomer who mainlined Dylan, and she's a 35-year-old, laptop-oriented songcrafter, a polarizing social media icon, and a wary celebrity who sometimes shines in the glare of her partner's outsize fame and other times is understandably insistent on privacy. When I told my millennial son that I was interviewing her, he questioned her relevance. And why, of all people, was I doing the interview?
But we connected easily because she's one of the most WIRED people imaginable. Her songs draw on the cyberpunk heroism celebrated in our pages and pixels. She's obsessed with Dune. Her belief that tech can save us maps to the often rosy outlook that has brought attention and scorn to our brand. And few things are more WIRED than her current project: providing a platform for wannabe Grimeses to, through the magic of AI, swap their voices for hers when they write and perform tunes. All without copyright concerns. (If you commercialize the tunes, she gets half.) Naysayers point out that it's easier for the underground-ish Grimes to pull off such a move than, say, Beyoncé. Even her manager told Rolling Stone that "you don't hear Grimes that much anyway." But for a legit musical artist-she's headlining with the Cure at a couple of concerts later this year-it's a bold move, reflecting her impulse to embrace the future.
As the afternoon drew down, the four of us talked about AI, music, art, motherhood, and Mr. Musk. Though c, or Grimes, or Claire, is an admitted troll, she beamed with optimism and sincerity, only occasionally skirting details by invoking some mysterious NDA. The interview is edited for length and clarity.
STEVEN LEVY: You're letting other people use your voice for their musical compositions-open sourced yourself, as you put it.
C: And open sourced my IP. And kind of my whole identity.
Why do that?
I've always been more of a producer and engineer. I'm not a naturally great singer, and I'm pretty shy. At the beginning of my career, I tried to find a singer/front person, but no one was going to do that for a tiny indie artist in Montreal. The most rewarding creative times are when I'm able to work with other artists, especially other female artists. I can focus on everything else. Whereas if I'm performing, I'm getting pulled everywhere, and I'm stressed about my voice. So when the voice emulators started coming out, and there was that thing with Drake and the Weeknd, I saw that people were striking them down.
You're referring to the unauthorized, Al-generated tune that synthesized the voices of those artists. Clearly you are not in a panic about lending your voice to the rabble.
If anyone makes a good Grimes song, they can do it as me.
What have the results been like?
There's some good stuff. Two in particular were very, very good. They're so in line with what my new album might be like that it was sort of disturbing. It's like, "Who am I, and what am I here for?" On the other hand, it's like, "Oh, sick, I might get to live forever." I'm into self-replication. I don't know if you've read much about self-replicating AI, like robots or anything.
I wrote a book about it.
I'd love to read it. I just started researching this in earnest a couple days ago.
So this open sourced voice thing is about literally replicating yourself?
That would be the dream. A self-replicating pop star.
Once you've replicated your musical self, do you just go off and do other things?
Yes, I can do more of my schemes. I've got two projects I'm getting into right now. One is like the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer-I'm really into education.
I take it you're riffing on Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age.
Yeah, Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson kind of vibes. This is a baseline, entry-level educational project for me. I have a friend who I think I'm going to work with to develop something like a toy that can talk to you, like in Toy Story.
You're describing a ChatGPT companion.
Yeah, you're like, "Hey, what's the deal with volcanoes?" And it tells you, "This is what a volcano is." But it's more. It's got a personality. A pretty well-trained personality.
Sounds like Chucky.
I guess it could go awry. But in the short term it's actually pretty safe. I think a lot about the fertility crisis and low birth rates. If you can make life a lot easier for moms, maybe that would help. People get really scared to have AI companions for their kids, but it could be great for my kids to be talking to someone all day, as opposed to watching a screen.
I'm sure you'll see stuff like that coming up pretty soon.
I think a lot of smart people are working on this. I've met a lot of them, actually.
I bet. What's it been like immersing yourself in tech culture?
I've never met so many amazing people. It's like my social fabric is getting super shaken. And it's making me more ambitious. Also, I feel like I'm sort of at the end of music. When I first got into it, it was like the music-tech singularity. I'm working at home on my laptop, I can suddenly make songs. Every month there were new plug-ins, new cool stuff. It was this amazing renaissance period. But in the past couple of years, things have been slowing down.
On to Al, then?
I do think AI is gonna be the next thing. I have a lot of opinions about how it should be pursued. So another reason I'm here [in San Francisco] is that I'm trying to meet with all the people making generative AI music to try to convince them to do things in ways that are safe for the human psyche.
They're doing unsafe things to the human psyche?
Not necessarily. We should go to the edge of creativity. But I think we should do it very carefully. The thing that freaks me out is that AI can remove incentives for learning. LLMs are great, but I would maybe only have them in school. Is that something that I want my kids to have access to 100 percent of the time? Probably not. I want them to learn how to write; we are in a bit of a literacy crisis. That worries me a lot. Maybe that makes me sound old. But being able to read and write well deeply impacts the way you think.
Not surprisingly, I agree. I have been wondering-can an Al-generated piece of music have soul?
Yes. I signed an NDA, so I'm not allowed to say, but I've seen things that have extremely blown me away. I do worry about the future of art a bit. I think future cities will have low-tech zones, or low-tech schools, and there'll be boutique analog artists.
Would you spend time in a low-tech zone?
I like the high-tech zone. I'm a very pro-adventure person.
I never would have guessed.
I get my joie de vivre from exciting, novel things and experimenting and exploring.
If you had an opportunity to go back to, like, any recording session ever, what would you choose?
I would go see Beethoven. But that's not a recording session. I'd try to check if Beethoven was actually deaf. But the Ninth, that'd be sick. That's what I like. I know it's basic, but I love, love Vivaldi's Four Seasons. So I'd probably go see that, I guess. Also, I think I could be wrong about this. But Vivaldi was at a school for girls, writing all this music and getting 10-year-old girls to play it. I like the idea. It seems so aesthetically ridiculous.
How about films, are you interested in that?
I think cinema is still the best art form, although games can be up there. I do want to make films. A Midsummer Night's Dream update would be so sick. It maps on to AI really well-what if the fairies were actually made of artificial intelligence?
What other themes would you look at?
I'm obsessed with inaccurate historical text. The past: years of my life have been super bananas crazy, but not manner that I can publicly speak about. So I want to w the Icelandic saga version of my life-a super over-the-t magical, inaccurate version, like a historical text based a true story.
Like Sofia Coppola did with Marie Antoinette?
I'd be even more bananas than that.
I want to get to that bananas life ...
I've got NDAs. It's hard to talk about things very explic without saying things about other people's lives who very private.
Well, I do want to ask about Elon.
You get one Elon question.
We'll see. But here's a question. Both of you are super unique people. I'm curious what you learned from him. And what he learned from you.
I learned from him, like, the best internship ever. People don't like talking about Elon, but it was incredible to be right there watching all that SpaceX stuff happen. That's a master class in leadership and engineering and makes you understand how rare it is to have a leader of that quality.
And Twitter?
I know, the stuff on Twitter doesn't make it look like that. He didn't build the culture there. And the cultural fit has obviously been very intense. He holds his people to really high standards. Watching him, I understand how difficult it is to be a great general and do something of that magnitude. Elon has an old-world kind of discipline I really respect. And I think it rubs a lot of people the wrong way. They don't want to be in that hardcore zone. If you're not consenting to being in that hardcore zone, I get it. But he's challenged me a lot. I learned a lot about running my own team and my own life. I'm now way tougher and smarter than I used to be.
What did he learn from you?
Maybe to have more fun. I try to soften him up, to build family culture. And he steals a lot of my memes.
It's fascinating that Elon is taking your 3-year-old son, who you call X, to business meetings and other activities. There's a weird kind of protégé thing going on, right?
I'm here for that. X knows a lot about rockets. It's crazy. He knows more about rockets than me.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1450523853/1692000846/articles/FPnP768K91692178108943/6f6RVjkpt1692178510511.jpg]
He's a rocket scientist!
We had to stop giving him toys, because if they're not anatomically correct, he gets upset. He's a little engineer, for sure. But his obsession with space is bordering on, "Is this healthy?" When X saw Starship blow up, he had, like, a threeday PTSD meltdown. Every hour, he was waking up and going, "Starship..." and I had to rub his back.
And your daughter... Y, is it?
Yeah, she's a little engineer too. She likes industrial shipping. She's very strange.
How has motherhood changed you?
Motherhood made me a lot more optimistic. I was not super focused before. It was just, what sounds cool, what feels cool. Now I feel a social responsibility with my art-to make future-optimistic art. Not a lot of people are doing that. People have a very dire vision of the future, because it's easy and fun to write about cyberpunk dystopias. So seeing my kids makes me pathologically optimistic. It's a life mission.
Their father is the richest man in the world. Do you worry about privilege?
A little bit. I think their life is gonna be pretty intense. Being Elon's kid is not the same as being anyone's kid. In my house, at least, I want it to be more of a crazy warehouse situation and a cool art space.
You mentioned Twitter. Did you call out to Elon that you were disturbed by some of his tweets?
I don't want to talk about this too much. But take the trans thing. After that, we had a big, long conversation. I was like, "I want to dissect why you're so stressed about this." Getting to the heart of what Elon says helps me get to the heart of what other people's issues are, because it's this über guy situation. And it came down to pretty much every way that you transition can cause fertility issues. I was like, OK, you don't hate trans people, you hate woke culture. I get that it can be annoying, and you have concerns about the fertility thing. So let's figure it out, because there's a lot of fertility tech that could be innovated that would help trans people have kids, which would be great and would solve a lot of problems. He's just on Twitter, and he's unhappy with woke people, and the arguments happened.
Aren't you a woke person?
Probably not. I don't know what the term means. I think we need to change the discourse. The more people you can convince that this dichotomy is silly, and an out-of-date fight, the better. The root cause of this is people not resolving mental health stuff the right way. And not educating people on screen time where they get hooked on dopamine spikes.
Says a video game lover.
Social media is gonna spike your dopamine way more than a video game-and always in a negative way. Video games are still adventure. They're artistic, creative, and truly social. They're fulfilling some ancient thing that people need. Social media is optimized to spike your adrenals with monkey fear. It's like, "Oh no, am I gonna get kicked out of the tribe?" Do you get that way on social media? Less so now. I've gotten in trouble enough times that I don't get the adrenal response. The last few times I got, quote-unquote, canceled, I didn't even notice. It took me probably a year and a half to regulate my nervous system to that level of chaos.
Do you consider yourself a transgressive person?
Probably. But respectfully so. I want to respect everyone's space.
Were you that way as a kid?
I was. I went to Catholic school, and I remember pretending to be possessed by the devil and stuff.
How did that play?
I got in trouble. A lot. Being a troll is in my nature.
Were you ever seriously into drugs?
I don't really get addicted to things. But I was not a well-behaved kid. I did LSD for the first time when I was, like, 13.
What did you get from that?
I saw the grid on everything. It gave me this incredible sense of physics. After I did it once, I could just draw anything from memory in my mind from different angles.
In school, you studied neuroscience?
Yeah, lately I've wanted to finish my degree. I am tempted to go back to school and get into helping create systems that allow us to be better adapted to tech, or tech better adapted to us. So that we can be more mentally stable as we accelerate into the future.
Are you drawn to the brain-machine interface stuff?
I'm so into it. I think that's really the future. I'm very into accelerating human potential alongside AI. For people who want it.
Would you volunteer to have your brain wired with Elon's Neuralink?
Probably. I'd want a certain number of people to do that first.
Do you want to go to space?
Definitely. I hope to die in space.
What do you mean?
I would like to go far enough out there to where my body could not handle coming back. So it would be closer to the end of my life. Maybe 65.
By out there do you mean Mars?
Mars would be great. I hope there's a megastructure by then because I would love to see one in space. I'd go out there and live as long as I can until I di...
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WIRED (Digital) - 1 Issue, September 2023