TED 2024

TED 2024 gathered in Vancouver in April under the theme The Brave and the Brilliant. Among the most discussed sessions was a Spotlight Conversation on creativity at a moment of profound technological change: what does it mean to make something now, when generative tools can produce images, music, and text at scale? What survives of authorship, of artistic intention, of the long relationship between human imagination and the work it produces?

Honor joined Scott Belsky, Chief Strategy Officer at Adobe, for a conversation moderated by Debbie Millman of the Design Matters podcast. Organised by TED's arts and design curator Chee Pearlman, the session took as its starting point the work of artists who have spent years thinking carefully about what it means to collaborate with machines: Refik Anadol, Memo Akten, Mario Klingemann, Sougwen Chung, Harold Cohen, Kate Crawford, Vladan Joler, Holly Herndon, and Mathew Dryhurst. These are not artists who stumbled into technology but artists for whom the questions technology raises have always been the subject.

The conversation argued for a new paradigm of creativity rooted not in anxiety about displacement but in a longer view of how tools change the nature of practice. Every significant shift in the means of making has provoked the same fears and produced new forms that were unimaginable before the shift arrived. The question is not whether creativity survives, but what it becomes.