AI, Art and Self-Expression with @covacut

Introduction

00:22 Leila

Well, hi everyone, and thank you so much for coming. We're all here today to celebrate technology, AI, and the way it allows us to express ourselves, whether it's through art or through travel. That's one of the reasons I'm so excited to present tonight's talk with Cole, who is one of the leading AI-inspired creators of our time. Cole went from making videos in her dorm room to 350,000 followers on Instagram in about a year. A very short amount of time. Very, very impressive. I love her videos, and if you haven't seen them, she's made incredible work. She's made clones of herself. She's made a robot walk on her dorm room desk. She's made all these tutorial videos to help other people learn how to make art that expresses themselves with AI. In total, her work has reached over 80 million people.

I find this to be a really personal topic because of the work we do at Stardrift. We are an AI travel planner, and some of what we've been doing in the last year is trying to figure out how to make AI personal. It's easy to generate the top-hits travel plan on ChatGPT or Claude. But how do you make it actually personal? How do you make it a story that you actually want to live through, and not just something that anyone could do?

01:27 Leila

Thank you all for coming, both for Cole and for us.

01:30 Cole

Hi everyone. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited.

What Undertale tells us about design and constraints

01:33 Leila

To start off, I wanted to ask you about Undertale, a video game that you draw on for a lot of your videos. Is there a particular reason you pick Undertale, or are drawn to it?

01:47 Cole

Oh my God, there are so many reasons. It's been a while since I last played it, might be almost ten years. But it was one of my really early inspirations that led me into game dev and pixel art. To give three reasons. One, it felt like such an impactful and important story, yet it was delivered in such a cozy way. For context, Undertale is an RPG where you play a character who has fallen down into a world of monsters. There are a few pathways through the game, but you decide how friendly you want to be with the monsters, and you can go down a few different routes.

02:36 Leila

And it's a very emotional game. It almost makes you feel like you love these animated characters. You feel like they have real life in the end.

02:45 Cole

And the design itself, the pixel art, the music, which was also intentionally designed by the creator, everything end to end was done with so much constraint. You only have so many pixels, you only have so much in 8-bit music, but it expressed so much within all of those constraints.

03:02 Leila

Is there a reason you felt so drawn to 8-bit music and video games for your AI art?

03:09 Cole

That's a good question. I feel like design has always been about constraints. I've never been formally trained in design. I was in fact CS, more on the engineering side. But I've always designed everything in my own day to day, and I really feel like pixel art and 8-bit music forced you to be extremely creative, pushing the edges of what you can do with a medium.

03:41 Leila

So there's something about the constraints. Do you feel constrained when you use the models to make art?

03:50 Cole

I was just talking to a friend who's a journalist, and she said, "I actually cannot wait for AI to get better, because it's not good enough. It cannot do what I want to do." And for myself as a creative, it's also just not good enough to realize my exact vision. But that's where design comes in, and personal choice, and craft. Craft is about the details it takes to realize the vision, and those always arise from constraints.

04:21 Leila

Do you have a sense of how you'd want the models to improve to help you with your art?

04:26 Cole

To give a concrete example: I'm personally working on an open-source animation library to help with my own videos, which I'd also love to make more widely available. It's based on all of my hand-drawn illustrations. I wish AI would interpret the different passes more clearly to my vision. I want one pass for the shapes animating, one pass for a style transfer. But creatives have such a personal process, and AI is not able to personalize to that process and learn quickly. So you have to really steer it. You have to build your own systems. I just wish it would get better to the point where you can actually build personalized creative systems.

05:18 Leila

So it's perfect, but it's also very generic.

05:20 Cole

Yes, exactly. But that gives way to taste and craft.

Why Cole isn't worried about being replaced

05:24 Leila

You don't seem worried about being replaced by AI. Why? I ask mostly because you've brought up how other artists feel worried about it. I'm curious if you have a sense of why you don't feel that fear.

05:37 Cole

A lot of my audience online is artists and creatives, and there's definitely the existential threat of, do I still get any delight from my work if AI can replicate it in minutes, sometimes seconds? On one hand I am a little existential. I was an illustrator for a lot of my time in middle school and high school, and now I do illustration less and a lot more video editing, because I feel it's less able to be replicated by AI. So to some extent, yes, it takes away from the joy of certain creative crafts and brings me into others. But I'm not worried per se, because a person's experience throughout their entire life gives them a very distinct sense of taste. I think everyone has taste. They just haven't understood why they've come to that taste, or really thought about it very much. So I really think everyone has something to bring to craft, design and creativity, and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon.

Why cyberpunk resonates in the modern era

06:51 Leila

Speaking of taste and influence: your videos have a very cyberpunk theme. They're very dark. Why is that?

06:59 Cole

I've heard this a lot, that my videos are really dark, cyberpunk colors. There are two reasons. One, I found it by accident. When I was starting out as a creator I was very intentional about testing different styles, and this style really stuck. It resonated with me and it resonated with the audience. I've heard that people would scroll and stop on my videos because, "oh wait, that's her video." So that's one reason, through experimentation. But second, it's always been an implicit reference. I love sci-fi. The recent one I've seen is Arcane, and it reminds me so deeply of my own style. It's one of my absolute favorite shows ever.

07:51 Leila

I was going to ask what piece of cyberpunk art you'd recommend, but it sounds like that's Arcane.

07:57 Cole

Everyone should watch Arcane.

07:58 Leila

I haven't seen it, otherwise I'd ask you more about it. Do you have a one-line pitch?

08:05 Cole

It really mirrors what we see in the world today. Without spoilers, it describes a fictional world where there's a class above ground living in luxury and style, and an underclass, which is a little eerie, of people who don't reap the benefits of technology. And it follows these students, these young researchers, pushing toward progress, but at what cost? It explores a lot of different stories and characters tied to that. It felt very resonant, and I'm surprised I only saw it this year, literally two months ago.

Where does the name covacut come from?

08:49 Leila

Where does the name covacut come from?

08:51 Cole

For context, my handle is covacut, on Instagram and pretty much every platform now. "Cut" is like editor's cut, self-explanatory. And Cova is the name of my favorite artist when I was twelve. We were drawing personas on this certain site, and my favorite artist there was called Cova. I tried to find her again, and I think she's a tattoo artist somewhere now, but she no longer goes by Cova. I just needed a username, so I thought of something that sounded like my name but that I could also hide behind. And it was Cova.

When will we see the first AI artist?

09:33 Leila

Speaking of underclass, I had two AGI questions, and maybe they're a little generic, so I apologize to everybody. Do you think we'll still be making art in the post-AGI world?

09:49 Cole

I 100% think we will. There's a lot to get into, but a wider sentiment amongst creators is that craft is going to be the most interesting thing to watch over the next couple of years. My prediction is a diversified pool of art forms and crafts: some led by AI, some hybrid, which is what I do, where I keep a lot of the work manual, and also fully AI artists.

10:25 Leila

That was my other question. Do you think we'll see a fully AI artist in the next five years? What's your timeline on the first AI artist?

10:33 Cole

AI is already an artist, depending on how you define it. The way I'd define art is that you've put intention and process into your craft, there was an artistic intention behind it and a vision you wanted to execute. Right now I don't think AI is fully there, acting with specific intention based on life experience and a certain vision. But in the future, yes.

11:04 Leila

How many years?

11:08 Cole

A year or two.

11:09 Leila

A year or two till the first AI artist?

11:12 Cole

I think so.

11:12 Leila

Wow. Okay. I'm not sure we'll ever see an AI artist, to be honest.

11:17 Cole

How would you define art?

11:19 Leila

Oh gosh, I don't know. But I'm a notorious AGI skeptic. Notorious to my friends, at least. I think there's a sense of humanity that we're still missing from AI. I do think we're starting to see it a little, but I haven't seen it yet.

11:37 Cole

That's a very fair take. We should talk about this.

11:42 Leila

Maybe talk about it here. What do you think?

11:45 Cole

I think AI now doesn't have the humanity and the personality. Products like Poke, which is top of mind for me, are really thinking about personality design, and it kind of gets there. It almost feels like you're talking to a human, but behind the scenes it's not really an entity acting with intention. But with the way research is going, there's a lot we don't know about how thinking works. Right now AI systems are grown, not designed. Because we don't really know how thinking works, we don't know if AI thinking is similar to our thinking, and therefore we don't know whether AI has intention, because intention is related to thinking. We don't even understand how our own thinking works, let alone AI thinking. So I really think it's an unanswered question.

12:47 Leila

That's fair. And that might be the thing I wish I could think more about. It's fascinating how something like physics used to be philosophy. The Greeks had theories about what you could cut things into, and eventually we discovered you could cut things into atoms. I think it would be a very cool time to be a philosophy student of consciousness.

The reason I've started to come around on this is the coding agents. Your point about Poke is interesting, because as the agents get more memory they really take on a personality. I use Claude Code a lot, and I've heard people talk about "my Claude, your Claude." My Claude's different from your Claude. It has a personality.

13:34 Cole

It knows me.

13:36 Cole

It does feel like they have a bit more personality. I personally haven't experienced that much. To some extent, I feel like my Poke has gone more girly over time, but for some folks I see their Poke and I'm like, your Poke is really bro-y. So I think it's context, and of course the agent is going to behave differently.

One piece of advice for beginners making art with AI

13:58 Leila

If you could give one piece of advice to people who make art with AI, what would it be? What do most people get wrong?

14:08 Cole

There's so much I could say. My one piece of advice would be: don't worry. And if you are worried, really think about who you are and pick out all of the things you're drawn to, because that's the unique part that defines your work. Because I know this about myself, I feel very confident that I will always create and always be happy with the process.

Why tech pays creators while it talks about replacing them

14:48 Leila

That was another question I wanted to ask. The AI companies are spending huge amounts saying they're automating creative work, but they're also paying creators like you to make work for them, and paying more and more. I think you've said this is one of the best times to be a tech influencer. Why do you think so? What is it that you do that the models can't do yet?

15:11 Cole

It's very ironic. Tech wants to build creative models. Take the launch of Astra, which is being called the most creative model yet, with crazy 3D renders, browser use, whatever. At the same time, tech is throwing money at creators. I have a friend who's been a creator for ten years, super prolific, and she said, "This is the best time it has ever been for me as a creator. It has never been this good."

15:40 Leila

Why is it the best time?

15:42 Cole

One, tech has a lot of money to invest in creators, so creators get paid downstream. Everyone knows we're in a bubble. Second, tech is interested in being more legible, because these tools remain very inaccessible, and creators are the accessible doorway to hundreds of thousands of people. Even just as brand value: if you put it in front of people enough times, they start to normalize it, which makes them more likely to adopt the tool.

16:24 Leila

My skeptical read is that they know people don't like AI, but if they get a nice pretty girl to make a video about it, people come to like it.

16:32 Cole

Sorry, that is Anthropic strategy for sure. No, no, I think this is actually, not even nice pretty girls...

16:43 Leila

I say this as someone who identifies as a nice pretty girl. I hope.

16:47 Cole

100%. With any kind of new product, people are not going to like it, and historically brands have always worked with creators. Tech has more money and is a little less accessible, so it makes sense they'd work with creators. Anthropic, for example, has built a reputation for always working with extremely vibey creators, all the same cohort who all know each other. Speaking as a former Claude creator. So it's where the economics lie. It's much better to spend the budget on creators reaching hundreds of thousands of people than on an ad, which people take in less now because legacy TV and legacy media are not doing as well.

Does tech take short-form seriously?

17:41 Leila

Why isn't short form taken more seriously in tech circles?

17:45 Cole

I think short form is taken extremely seriously. Long-form content is significantly down in views. I was talking earlier with the folks at Publish Press and Colin and Samir, who are creators creating for creators, and they've spoken publicly about YouTube changing its algorithm in response to declining long-form views and attention. Views for the top creators on YouTube have been down.

18:18 Leila

I agree the tech companies take it seriously. But my friends talk about how short form is brain rot. I never see a short-form video shared in tech circles. It's always essays and podcasts for us. Okay, maybe it's just X. Maybe it's just me. One of the things I find really cool about your videos is that you take short form extremely seriously and use it to express quite a deep view.

18:46 Cole

Thank you. I really do feel like short form is taken extremely seriously, but maybe it's not as obvious. I focus on short form. I think it's an art form to put a bunch of knowledge into a one- or two-minute explainer, because people no longer have the time to sit down and watch something super long, and they want to feel informed. Unfortunately, short form does stop you in the scroll, and that is not good. But for my most viral video, I spent 50 hours on a one-minute video.

19:21 Leila

Wow.

19:21 Cole

And I have no regrets. Zero regrets.

Cole's next project

19:24 Leila

That's incredible. One final question. You just said that in the age of AI, the most important thing is to notice. What are you noticing? What have you noticed that you want to make your next piece of art about?

19:38 Cole

I'm working on a project independently, a historical archive, which I think makes a lot of sense for this space. There's something very interesting about history that we need to pay attention to and preserve. Before I launch it I don't want to give too much detail, but it's an archive of historical clips.

20:03 Leila

Amazing. Where can people find more about you?

20:07 Cole

You can just search me up. It's covacut on any platform (Instagram, YouTube, X, newsletter at hyphen.art).

20:11 Leila

And I'm Leila from Stardrift. Thank you so much for coming. We're going to go into a quick Q&A. I think we have time for two or three questions.

Q&A: embodiment and AI judgment

20:22 Audience

This was a really insightful session. I'm curious what your thoughts are on the relationship between embodiment and the formation of judgment, especially as AI has almost caused a disembodiment of cognition and art, where you have a brain that isn't attached to any sensory experience or perception.

20:52 Cole

That's such a good question. It's very philosophical. Does an entity need to be embodied to think and reason as we do? Is that a fair interpretation?

21:05 Audience

My question is what you interpret to be the relationship between possessing a physical body, or some simile of one, and the ability to form independent judgment.

21:22 Cole

That makes a lot of sense. I'd need to think about it more, but the first way I'd approach it is that your physical embodiment is a way to experience the world and gather the experiences that inform you. If we made the parallel to AI versus human, it's a different sort of context. Physical embodiment gives you context for how you respond to everything. And that's interesting, because it might be what differentiates our cognition from a machine's. They don't have the context that comes from being in the physical world, like helping someone, for example. That's an entirely different sort of context we have.

22:09 Leila

It's probably a big thing we're missing in AI art. Great.

The step-by-step process @covacut uses to make her videos

22:21 Audience

What does your creative process look like, and how do you make it personalized?

22:28 Cole

That's a great question. AI out of the box is super general, super basic, so how do we personalize it to get some use out of it as a creative? For context, last week I joined OpenAI to work on story.

22:51 Leila

Congratulations.

22:53 Cole

So I have a process now that I've joined and have been working a lot in Astra, and one from before. Previously I was almost fully manual on all creative decisions, including editing myself, because computer use by any agent just did not crack it, especially for editing. I use Adobe Premiere and After Effects, which are very nitty-gritty and hard to use. But what I would use AI for is everything that is not the creative process. I have a few stages: ideation, script, storyboard, film, edit, and it needs to translate from brief to brief so I don't need to think, I just know what to shoot and what to say. AI has automated that entire process. I'd use Obsidian with Codex or Cursor or Claude Code or whatever agent. It all worked the same, because I gave them very clear templates and guidelines.

Now with Astra, because it's very good at browser use, I've built myself a bunch of little skills, and I'm working through the best way to approach it. I give very specific instructions and just let it go. For example, I handed over my hand-drawn illustrations and said, match them word for word to my video. Then I went away, ate dinner, came back, and it was placed. So I'm figuring out my process again. But I think: always be specific. These agents are getting better and better at listening and responding to specific instructions. In the past they wouldn't even listen. Now they listen, but you still have to be specific.

24:31 Leila

It sounds like the step-by-step process is pretty important, but maybe getting less so over time, which is interesting. Curious how that plays out. I think we should wrap up for now. Thank you so much for joining us today, and thank you so much, Cole. Thank you everybody.