When electronic musician Grimes – AKA Claire Boucher – took to X last year to claim she was “only gonna be releasing music on LinkedIn from now on”, it seemed like yet another provocation from an often eccentric artist. But the ex-partner of Elon Musk may have followed through on her promise. Last month, a profile purporting to be the 38-year-old appeared on the world’s least gratifying social networking platform. Its only post so far promotes an appearance at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference – Nvidia being the most valuable company in the world and the engine behind just about all AI applications.
Pivoting to LinkedIn might seem a depressing thing for an artist to resort to: a bit like moving in with your boomer grandparents. And it is. I should know because, in one of the more counterintuitive brags I’ve made in my two-decade career as an artist, I did it first.
My latest art project, Image Empire – a public information film about 3D worlds and AI deepfakes, told in the guise of a children’s fairytale – was released on LinkedIn in early March. It did some pretty good numbers, but sank quickly thanks to LinkedIn’s clunky algorithm, which likes to stockpile content and drip-feed it slowly to users via constant push notifications. In fact, just like when your grandparents give you out-of-date biscuits from the back of the kitchen cupboard, LinkedIn also likes to offer stale goods – job ads that expired three weeks ago, for instance. And just like visiting your grandparents, a trip to LinkedIn involves a whole lot of biting your tongue and smiling politely.
So why would any artist decamp here? The chief reason is “enshittification”, which has wreaked havoc on creative communities. The generous spirits who once filled Twitter, Etsy or Vimeo with content have long since scarpered, only to be replaced by a flood of automated bots, NFT hustlers, dropshippers and AI forgers. Unsure of how or what to share now that the internet is a scrapable bucket of free training data, artists have had limited success rebuilding networks on TikTok and Instagram. With attention spans, sales, wages and funding all in decline, it’s looking bleak for the creative industries: we’re all having to hustle harder for diminishing rewards. Of course, there will be many people whose response to all this is: boo-hoo, poor artists. “Get a job!” screams gilet-wearing Steve from Berkshire. Well, Steve, we are trying.
I headed for LinkedIn because I wanted to start a conversation with the site’s strange mix of AI disruptors and AI victims about tech, video games, AI and our precarious post-work future. The film, which is three and a half minutes long, was inspired by John Berger’s legendary art history series Ways of Seeing, and came as a follow-up to my 2023 film The Wizard of AI, which prefigured the term “AI slop” with the admittedly less catchy “pixel soup”. Channelling Hans Christian Andersen via The Matrix, Image Empire is my attempt to tell the creation myth of Nvidia (the name of the company means “envy” in Latin, which provided the inspiration to tell it as a fairytale about two envious twins).
Despite a tight production schedule, by the time Image Empire was released, the story it told already seemed quaint. In the first three months of this year alone, we’ve had a succession of Black Mirror-esque reports on engineers scanning fruit fly brains to create fly avatars in game worlds, robots being trained by human “arm farms”, and human brain tissue playing the 1993 video game Doom. In recent weeks, LinkedIn itself has become even more of a dystopian nightmare: members are using ChatGPT, Claude and LinkedIn’s own AI optimiser to write their posts, rendering the platform almost unusable. Almost every post is formatted in that familiar overdramatic cadence of “it’s not just X, it’s Y” and, while AI’s human adversaries are quickly learning to spot this lazy copy, such posts still seem to be getting engagement. The most popular ones are filled with AI bros slapping each other on the back for “changing the game for ever”.
What LinkedIn – and big tech in general – is really hungry for are “storytellers”: people who can take control of a corporate narrative and “own” the story. There are apparently six-figure bounties out for these “full-stack” creatives, which is surely the real reason Grimes is on LinkedIn to promote her Nvidia gigs: she’s been contracted as a talking head for Nvidia’s own image empire, which desperately needs hot air to inflate its bubble. And while these companies say they want storytellers, the only stories they actually want to tell are uncritical tales that glamorise their own tech.
Of course, for most other artists, working with big tech comes with all the social kudos of interning on the Death Star. But Grimes is different: she is one of the few “accelerationist” voices that leans into the dark futures that AI disruptors such as Musk, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman champion.
Digital creativity today is often used like this, as a form of “artwashing”. That’s why a group of creative technologists co-signed an open letter in 2024 refusing OpenAI’s underfunded invitation to play with Sora, their recently defunct AI video creation app. Calling the project “outsourced R&D”, these artists mirrored my own lightbulb moment when, in 2020, after I released a film about synthetic data and CGI, Nvidia got in touch to sound out a partnership. The line went dead when I asked for a new graphics card in return, but I suppose at three grand a pop, they are pretty pricey. Maybe Grimes will have better luck than me – if she can figure out how to “leverage new agentic pipelines to change storytelling for ever”, that is. Good luck, Claire!