Sealaska Heritage Institute: Lecture: Continue Making a Living as an Artist and Avoid Being Replaced by AI | Sealaska Heritage

Absolutely. Okay, yeah, thanks. Yeah, all good. You got water. Nice and crisp water too.

Good, good, good. Yeah, the rest of us aren't allowed to drink in here, so—. Yeah, my, my throat has been getting drier than usual these past couple years. Yeah, because I live in the desert and I hike It's like, I always bring two water bottles. Mm-hmm.

Well, you know that. Calgary and Albuquerque were very dry. Calgary, I started getting nosebleeds when I was there first time. Oh, really? Yeah, I was only 18 and I started getting nosebleeds just from the dryness because I grew up in Toronto right on the water.

I grew up on a lake. It didn't look like the ocean, but I grew up with a lake right there, so we always had humidity. And then Calgary, it's so dry, so I was trying to remember the name of the faculty member who got her PhD. Well, she studied at Oklahoma. We both had the same birthday, nikaw.

And I forgot. Do you know where she works now? Somewhere in Calgary. In art history? Yeah, yeah.

We should be able to figure that out. I think it's—. But she's going to be emeritus now, right?

Um, no, no, she's younger. Okay. Yeah, maybe it wasn't Calgary. What's just north of Edmonton? The University of Alberta is a very big, um, big school.

And Lethbridge isn't bad also. Lethbridge. Lethbridge. Okay. Yeah, and I don't know people at Lethbridge very well.

The only time I've been to Lethbridge is to play rugby. Oh really?

All right. Okay. Misha, shall we get started? Yes. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Sealaska Heritage Institute.

Our director of culture and history, Dylan Patterson, has asked me to do the introductions. I'm Kelly Monteleone. I'm the underwater anthropologist here at SHI. Before we begin, I'd like to ask you to please silence your cell phone and remember that there is no food or drink allowed in the clan house. With that, it's my pleasure to introduce our speaker today, Hechde Larry McNeil.

Larry grew up in Juneau and Anchorage and was raised by his grandmother in Juneau, has many siblings and extended family. He learned the proper skills of being a professional commercial fisherman in his teens and worked as a fisherman for a number of years. He later worked on the Alaska Pipeline to pay for his college education, worked in Alaska as a photographer and eventually went on to graduate school for photography. We're both University of New Mexico alumni for that. He then followed that up with a 32-year career as an artist and teacher of art and digital technology.

Man after my own heart, digital technology. He became a professor and later professor emeritus and continues his lifelong career as an artist. And he's a professor emeritus at Boise State University. There'll be an opportunity for questions at the end of the lecture. If you're watching online, please feel free to add them into the chat.

And with that, I ask you to all help me welcome Larry to SHI. Thank you.

Yes, thank you. Thank you for being here. I do appreciate it. And I know that there's people in the audience too, so welcome for tuning in. And that this becomes a part of the SHI archive too.

I really like that part, you know, so researchers can, you know, come and study what you have recorded here. So I really love that part. And I just wanted to briefly say something quickly about the lecture today. You know, it's going to be about in the age of artificial intelligence, artists need to be more innovative with making a living as artists. We need to be innovative and reassert the authenticity of our art in the face of AI.

So I wanted to be upfront too about my own take on artificial intelligence. You know, these days it's starting to be kind of demonized, you know, it's like, oh yeah, AI is doing all this great stuff for us, but we have no idea What's going to be happening as part of our future culture, like our future culture is being called humanity. Yes, our culture is called culture. So it's a question mark. You know, we have no idea what's in store for us with artificial intelligence.

But the way I want to frame it is not completely negative, or maybe not even— well, I would say not negative, But with a critical eye. You know, asking critical questions. And as far as I'm concerned, that's not being negative. That's examining the issue. Which is how it's always been for tribal people.

They think, "Oh, they're being negative when they're talking about this stuff." No, no, no. We're not being negative. We're just examining the culture and questions that are out there. You know, which is what we've always done. So I view myself as continuing that.

And I have a confession to make. I've been using AN for 10 years. You know, since long before it became more sophisticated. So the AI that I was using was in conjunction with how I teach. You know, which is digital photography and digital media and so forth.

And so I was an early adopter, you know, to artificial intelligence. And 10 years ago, AI was very crude, you know, and it was really a hybridity of AI and handwork. So with the digital technology, there are no verbal prompts you could use. You know, you had to actually go in and do handwork, you know, do handwork on a computer. And really, you know, the digital part were these, your fingers.

So it was truly a hybrid back then, you know, 10 years ago. And I really loved the possibilities that were happening, and which is how I taught my students too. You know, I would have undergrads and graduate students, and the way I teach the classes was to teach it so that they learned the digital technology and the analog technology and the hybridity that happens in the mix of all of it. And that's really where we are right now. You know, it's really kind of a hybridity of a lot of different processes, you know.

And however, you know, as we all know, um, AI is kind of like this drunken car, you know, going 200 miles an hour, you know, down a busy street, and there's no guardrails or very little guardrails. And that's the scary part, you know. And I think that, you know, that's where where everybody needs to be critical about discussing what's going on and so forth. So anyway, some of my digital work from 10 years ago, if you look at part of it, you can see that— well, I can see it. I can look at my artwork and go, oh my God, that's where AI kind of made a mistake.

You know what, I left it there for time's sake, just so people can see, yeah, yeah, you know, we don't look really that smart after all. You know, it was kind of a goofy thing, but it's come a long way. So I wanted to talk really briefly about excuse me, artificial intelligence. So just to make sure we have a level playing field here, AI is the ability of a computer to perform tasks normally connected to intelligent beings. You know, of course that makes this question, what are intelligent beings?

We've got some around, right? You know, so what do I mean? So AI is quickly developing more sophisticated abilities to reason, learn via vast amounts of content. In this current instance, the internet is a source of— for AI machine learning. So that's what's setting AI apart right now, you know, is that, you know, one of the largest repositories of information known to humanity, you know, and that's the internet.

You know, so however, as we all know, you know, the internet, you know, is not entirely edited. You know, there's all kinds of peculiar things that you find, you know, online. And AI doesn't have the ability to sort it by themselves yet. You know, so it takes in lots of junk too. You know, so that's why we have, um, —anyway, it's a monumental phenomenon because the internet can be viewed as one of the largest repositories of human knowledge and experiences, you know, as we all know.

For better or for worse. So AI is undergoing exponential growth, and the developers themselves are having a difficult time quantifying its creative growth. So that's the other thing. You know, the other part about quantifying what AI is, you know, and not being able to really gauge how fast it's evolving, you know, that's important. Question right now.

So AI has surpassed human performance. Sorry.

So AI has— excuse me, I've been living in the desert and I get this really dry throat. It's not So it's really nice being back home. Oh, liquid sunshine? Yeah, that's right. I'll take liquid sunshine.

Sounds good to me.

I think we got a technical hiccup here.

Is it the microphone? Yeah, the battery is— Oh. So AI has surpassed human performance in many instances such as DeepLay beating us in chess. That happened nearly 10 years ago. And also Go, you know, the Chinese game of Go.

You know, that's supposed to be, you know, impossible for AI to beat, of course. And take them— I think it took them— how long did it take? A matter of weeks. You know, it was really fast. And also AI, as we know, has the possibility of finding cures for diseases, you know, using complex pattern recognition with molecules that humans can't do.

Yeah, we just don't have that ability yet that the AI has. So AI has recently developed the ability to reason, problem solve, and perhaps most notably, understand language. AI learns more quickly than humans and coupled with powerful computers and data centers. Trial and error is one of the key ways that AI learns and is incredibly proficient because it performs tasks nearly instantly.

That may be why we're going to be left in the dust, you know, because it's happening at an exponential kind of speed, you know, the learning. One of the components of AI is called generalization because it requires past experience to be applied. And really, that's— I would say as a critic, you know, that's one of the weaknesses of AI right now. You know, it doesn't have human experiences. You know, it can't learn from, you know, the past experience that it's lived.

You know, so it's taking— it's essentially trolling the internet for learning. And that's not enough. You know, if they want to become more sophisticated, and to do things like understand art or even how to talk about art. You know, it needs to have lived experiences. And it just doesn't.

And language is also far more sophisticated than humans realize because we take it for granted. And we're often fluent by the time we're still small children. And AI has proven itself proficient with using learning and reasoning to learn languages. And I was— I used to teach at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. And the beauty of it is that it was a liberal arts kind of education and we'd have lots of subject matter, you know, and one of them was literature.

You know, the strong point of, you know, the institute was the literature area. And I was talking to one of the professors there and I was asking him, you know, at what age do children become proficient at reading and writing? And he gave me a very surprising answer and he said, "Oh yeah, that's easy, the 3rd grade." He was saying, "Yeah, they need to be able to learn language. They need to be able to write." by the third grade, you know, things like spelling, grammar, and so forth. And that took me— that kind of blindsided me until I thought about my own third grade experience and how our third grade teacher was, you know, so— was advocating reading so heavily, you know.

And so, oh yeah, that makes sense, you know. So, the language models such as ChatGPT, GPT have taken the use of AI to everyday people and were able to write fairly simple prompts or questions and may now expect to receive reliable answers in a style closely resembling human speech. You know, so that's what we're hoping for. You know, we're hoping to get those kind of things. And of course, as you probably know yourself from experimenting with it, That doesn't always happen.

You know, we get these unexpected responses back from AI things that, if nothing else, we need to acknowledge AI's abilities and how quickly it's progressed in just a few years. The notable part is that AI is still in its infancy and nobody can predict What will happen with it in the near and far future? It's still an open question. We're still learning as we're going along. But what we can agree on is that AI is like a Pandora's box.

You know, it's out of the box and we likely can't put it back. So what we need are guardrails. You know, so that's what a lot of the critics are— they're agreed on that. One thing, you know, AI needs— it's good that we have it. It's good that we have it as a tool, you know, that we can work with.

But it does need guardrails, you know. And I'm saying that as a critic myself, and I'm saying it as somebody who's taught it. You know, I've taught artificial intelligence as part of the course content for my own teaching. And so, we get quite immersed in it. And these are some of the hot topics that I have had with colleagues too.

You know, what about— what are we going to do with AI? And part of the debate, you know, has to do with students using AI for coursework. And, you know, and of course, they view that as cheating. Instead of having students do the work themselves, they have AI do some prompts. And I try and experiment myself.

I wanted to do a hybridity of them doing creative work and then going to AI and doing some prompts and then getting some answers from AI about the work too. And they had to do citations, the proper citations for it. So they'd write where they got the AI information and so forth. So it was a proper kind of research paper. But it was interesting because I was encouraging them to use the tools.

Say, you know what? These tools are here. And that's indisputable. So what we can do, though, as scholars and educators is to help students realize that it could be a tool for them. And they don't have to use it to replace the knowledge that they should be getting and using and researching, especially in a creative arena.

When students are expected to do creative work, you can't use AI to be doing that because you'll get a canned look that looks stale and stereotypical. And because AI doesn't know, you know, the meaning behind what a lot of the artwork is about.

So before I move on from AI itself, I'll just touch really briefly on some of the AI controversies, which I'm sure a lot of you are already very familiar with. So it's become controversial on many fronts. Including in the university systems where I taught for 32 years. Very controversial. You know, it's, it's a hot button topic in academia right now.

There are also biases becoming inherent with AI. And Stanford University recently published a headline that read, and I quote, "AI hiring tools can yield racial bias." and systemic rejection with their hiring. And this was in their human-centered artificial intelligence area. And this was dated May 26, 2026, if you want to, you know, look it up yourself. So, this is bad because so many businesses, schools, governments, and organizations are using AI to evaluate applicants.

And it is AI that is deciding who to hire. You know, that's happening right now. You know, today organizations are using AI for hiring purposes. You know, this is not a debate about what'll happen next year. It's about what's happening in the here and now.

And biases are being found in the AI hiring practices. And this is obviously bad because the AI appears to be funneling hiring biases into their own programming, you know. And think about that one for a second. So if you're looking for a job, this could translate to being out of work for a very long time if you're not white. Yes, that's a problem.

That's a serious problem. You know, and again, this is in the here and now.

This points to an ethics weakness that are starting to appear with the usage of AI as a systemic tool, especially when humans are removed from hiring decisions. You know, so that involves, you know, each and every one of you, you know, who are still looking for future employment. You know, maybe you're going to school, maybe you're deciding on an area of study, you know, maybe you want to go to graduate school and you want to figure out, you know, what's going to be over the horizon there. Then you read this study from Stanford University about hiring biases, you know, that AI is churning out, you know, and it's, it's It's an ethics problem. According to various journals, students are starting to use AI to write their admissions materials to colleges, such as their personal statement, cover letters, and essays.

And that happened nearly as soon as, you know, ChatGPT showed up. You know, students discovered, you know, they could go and do a prompt and I'll write a cover letter for them, you know. And, and they're going ahead and they're actually— this is happening here too, you know, this is happening now. Many schools are also using AI to evaluate those student applications. The irony is thick here with AI submitting student materials and AI evaluating AI content content masquerading as humans.

Is it also evaluating AI under the guise of having humans involved? At this point, a cynic could ask why humans are involved in the process at all.

And maybe it's AI who should be submitting to the colleges instead of students. Wouldn't that be funny or ironic? Or sad, you know, but anyway, this is not theoretical. You know, this is something that's happening now. This is happening as we're discussing this.

And I witnessed it myself, you know, because I'd sit on committees, you know, as a faculty member, and we'd be evaluating student applications to our programs. And you know what? That's one of the things that I was able to notice because I do a lot of writing. I was able to spot AI, you know? Yeah.

So if you're a scholar and you write a lot and you read a lot, you know, AI is actually pretty simple to spot, you know? And of course we spotted it, you know, we saw it pretty easily.

For an interesting peek at critics discussing AI, I'd suggest the Public Broadcasting System, PBS, NOVA special titled Deepfake Detective with Hany Farid. I may have butchered his name, my apologies. And the topic is broader than deepfakes, and Farid discusses the current state of AI and how it's impacting young people trying to navigate the choices with their own educations of life AI essentially eliminating their fields of study.

My advice for everything, for everyone, is to stay current with the news of what's unfolding with AI because it is evolving so quickly, incredibly quickly, including— excuse me— including the positive aspects of AI, not just the controversial subjects, you know. There are lots of positives too.

We're going to shift to the aspect of deciding to become an artist and continuing with their art practice in the era of AI. So I'm hoping that, you know, there are practicing artists in the audience and hopefully even, you know, young people who are thinking about what to do with their futures., you know, and hopefully, you know, young people thinking, I want to be an artist, you know, yeah, that's what I want to do. And because that's— it's as simple as that. That's how it starts, you know. Hey, that's how I became an artist when I was a 17-year-old guy.

I was working as a commercial fisherman in his I don't know who else has done that, but it's hard work. It's really hard work. And after a season of really hard work, I just kind of had an epiphany while I was flying home from Kodiak. And I was totally burned out. I mean, just totally exhausted.

We had done these— 24-hour workdays and so forth. We did— excuse me— we did well though. I went home with a very good payday. But at that point, I was thinking to myself, "I'm going to be an artist. I'm done with being a fisherman.

That's it." My dad was one of the best commercial fishermen in Alaska, but that's him. You know, it's like, yeah, um, and I, I know that I'll never match his talents and his skills and how hard he works and, and the natural gifts that he had as a commercial fisherman. After working with him for a number of years, I knew that I'd never be as good as him, you know. I just knew that, you know, just from witnessing it and, and so forth. So I was thinking, well, you know what, I like photography.

Not just like it, I love it. Right then and there, I decided I'm going to be a photographer. Not only that, I want to be an artist too. It was just as simple as that. You're a 17-year-old or 16-year-old and you turn the switch and you go, "I'm going to be an artist." That's it.

That's the advice that I have for aspiring artists. Is that it can be as simple as that. You just decide what you want to do and you change all your life's direction to doing that. Excuse me.

So deciding to become an artist, it's a bold step. First, figure out how to become proficient with your media. This is a fun step that often happens when you're young. And you're still figuring out what life is about. Experiment with taking various topics including the sciences and liberal arts.

Look at a lot of different fields. When you're an artist, you really have to know a lot about life too because really when you get right down to what artwork is about, it's about life. It's about people using the creative process to make art, to make objects, and that's telling a story about something. A lot of those most powerful stories come from actual real-life experiences, whether it's from your own life experiences, are from your cultural heritage, your clan house, your parents, your grandparents. They all inspire the kind of cultural identity that you were born with.

So you have that as a gift from your ancestors. So you can take that and use that as part of your creativity, part of you becoming an artist.

So I would kind of— in the next step after that is looking at, you know, questions about things like a liberal arts education. You know, that's what I'm talking about, you know, scholarship and so forth. But that's part of the arts too. You know, that's a substantial part of what being a creative person and an artist is too. Liberal arts education.

So the liberal arts are interdisciplinary and have what can be defined as a holistic approach to an education. By holistic, we generally mean that parts of something are interconnected and may only be referenced and learned by absorbing and understanding the broader topics. So it's, it's a whole spectrum of knowledge, you know. So that's the beauty and strength of what a liberal arts education is. The liberal arts subjects are also generally things like history, literature, the social sciences, economics, studio arts, music, environmental sciences, computer technology, psychology, and so forth.

So the interesting part is that every one of those topics has an indigenous part to it. You know, for example, there's indigenous history. You know, maybe you can't learn that part in a university setting, so you have to go off and do research, you know, and learn the proper historical parts of what your cultural identity is about. So that's part of what liberal arts education is too. Same with the social sciences.

You know, you think about the social sciences, you say, "Yeah, I can't think of anything more dull than that." But really, the social sciences have to do with everyday life. You know, us living our life day to day, you know, the things that we experience, the things that we do, those are the social sciences. And if we learn that from both a Western perspective in your university setting and from our own cultural background, that's a strength. You know, that's a huge strength because that means that you're bringing that knowledge back to your own people, you know, and you're making, you know, the people stronger. So this liberal arts education is essential to a broader study of humanity.

You know, it's about learning what humanity is about. Including the ability to problem solve. You know, that's a big deal. You know, that's a part of the liberal arts. That's what sets liberal arts aside from the sciences because with the sciences, they learn the mathematics, they learn the science, you know, and so forth.

But they often don't learn things like problem solving, which is what happens, you know, when taking liberal arts classes. Analyse ideas, you know, from a lot of different perspectives, a lot of different subjects, you know, not just sciences, not just math, you know, but analysing the ideas that we encounter in our everyday lives, you know. Look at it analytically. Read about it, write about it, talk about it, you know, with your teachers, with your professors, with your elders, you know. Sit down and talk to them about it and analyzing ideas with them.

And as part of learning how to learn a broad swath of topics, so at its core, it's really learning how to learn. That's what liberal arts is, learning how to learn, especially with learning to question what is being taught and offer your own interpretation of how various topics are presented, especially when creativity is a part of what is required. So that's what I've been doing for 32 years myself, you know, is teaching in the arts. You know, yeah, that's my forte, that's my strength, is I love, you know, working with creative ideas. You know, I love, you know, helping inspire students, you know, how to make artwork and to be able to talk about it, you know, to be able to discuss what the content is, you know, and so forth.

To imagine what should come next with various topics, you know, so that's another part of what liberal arts is too, you know. And the irony is that with computer science curriculums, people are being edged out of the field and their input is seriously eroded. For example, the AI computer code is being written by AI itself, and humans are not necessary to write some of the AI code. So, so I find that to be interesting, you know, that here at this point, you know, the, the students who would often be enrolled in, say, graduate computer science classes at UC Berkeley some of those classes are being dropped, you know, or being not as emphasized as strong as they were before. And the young graduate students are sometimes like deer in the headlights, literally, you know.

And that's what— if you talk to the educators, that's what they'll tell you themselves. So these young computer science students are questioning whether they should even enter that field. You know, and it's a quandary, you know, and that's where we are right now too. Lots of questions. People with the ability to write highly descriptive prompts are often better off with AI, you know.

So the irony is that these people who are taking AI and running with it are the ones who have the skills to interact with AI as a language-based model. This makes people with liberal arts degrees very proficient as those most capable of maximizing what AI has to offer. So this thing is just rife, you know, with irony, you know. So, so in this transition that's happening right now, you know, it's, it's the people in the arts, us, you know, the ones, the creative people, you know, they're the ones who are actually they're getting to be better with AI than the computer science students. And so I'm just— now that I'm not a full-time professor anymore, I talk to colleagues.

I say, hey, what's going on with this? And it is interesting hearing updates about what's going on with the field.

And this brings us back to deciding to become an artist. In the age of AI. So there are a lot of questions here. And this is where I'd have my students write some notes, because I'd quiz them about it later. Say, okay, what kind of art do you want to do?

And it's kind of a rhetorical question. You want to do Native art? And I ask, what's Native art? What is that? Is it all this?

Is it Preston Singletary's beautiful work? Is it the carvings that are outside here and how they learned how to do that? It's a very learned process. It's obviously Native art, but it's in different media, lots of different media. Mainstream art, there's a question of that too.

What is that? What is mainstream art? We can say, well, maybe it's a code word for saying any race can do it. Mainstream, white people do it, brown people do it, and people with various cultural backgrounds, and the work that's produced can be shown in regular museums, by regular museums. What's a regular museum?

It's a museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Smithsonian, Native art museums and so forth. What media? Lots of questions. Which media do you work with? Do you work with one of the ancient medias, like the Chilkat weaving or the carving?

Contemporary or in the style of our ancestors? More questions. Some people ask, why just pick one? Why just pick one medium? Why not do all types of art?

Why fence ourselves into just one type of art? At any rate, when young people are just starting out, the advice I give them, just have an open mind. Have an open mind about things that you discover along the way. You're going to find that you're drawn to different media. It's almost like magic.

It almost happens all by itself. That's the value of taking a lot of— learning a lot of different media. Trying out a lot of different styles and looks and media. Maybe it's something like printmaking. Maybe you accidentally discover that you have this latent gift for doing printmaking, and you never would have discovered it unless he took the class.

So I see that a lot, too. I see people discovering things, having this journey of discovery with how they learn with different art media. And with learning the art, there are still 3 ways, maybe there are 6 ways, I don't know. These are 3 essential ways. One of them is self-taught.

We all know people who are self-taught artists. Second is via an apprenticeship with a master artist. That's a very time-honored way of learning that comes from ancient times with indigenous people, is working as an apprentice with a master artist. The third way is by gaining a formal education at an art school, university, or other school. You know, so those are 3 essential ways of sifting, you know, this concept down of, you know, learning the art itself.

Excuse me. If you're naturally gifted, being self-taught may be doable, although it may take longer than the other 2 choices. Many people fail when trying this route because it because complex techniques are often involved in learning and YouTube just doesn't cut it. You know, that it won't work. You know, you have to essentially, you end up learning, you know, either via a mentorship program or with a formal education, you know.

And the people who do the YouTube stuff, that's just temporary. That's fun stuff, you know, to do on the weekend. You know, not something that's a livelihood per se.

Somebody's going to prove me wrong though. Somebody's always going to prove you wrong. You know, somebody's going to say, "I learned via YouTube." You know, and they said, "Yeah, I took like— I was watching YouTube videos for a year, you know, and look at what I did." You know, so anyway, I know somebody's going to prove me wrong and that's okay. 'Cause that's a part of the creative process too.

If you're naturally gifted— oh, becoming an apprentice is via an interview process. You need to prove yourself as being both talented, hardworking, and willing to learn. I don't know if anybody here has actually applied to be an apprentice with a master artist, but often it's more difficult than an academic one via university process. A master artist is often very discerning and will only pick the most dedicated, hardworking apprentices. Get used to the idea of this path being very competitive, but don't give up on the path if you do wish to pursue it because they're all competitive.

Regardless of the path you take. And the formal education at a school may be a good option, and the pluses are that you learn your art from a— in a thorough manner by a number of professors who are all experts in their medias. So you don't learn from just any one person. You have this whole spectrum of these professors who have different teaching styles. You know, they have different approaches to creativity.

You know, and I view that as being a very positive thing because as a young art student, you're able to appreciate all the nuances, you know, of— you know, that it takes to get a formal education.

In the era of AI, getting a liberal arts education is one of the best strategies to get getting degrees these days. It's because AI is taking over with writing computer code, chip design, and general computer science. With AI programs, they're generally operated with prompts, as you know. Anyone who can write and communicate well will have an edge with landing a job with very professions, including being an artist. Many computer science students are having a difficult time with getting jobs in the high-tech sector because those jobs are being rapidly replaced with AI.

So there's more irony all over the place. I should retitle this talk to "The Irony of AI." Earning the art degree— how are we doing on time, by the way?

Oh, good, good. Okay, I'm right on time. So I want to talk some of the, you know, the other aspects of becoming an artist too and applying to universities or art school, and that's the portfolio. You know, this is unique as your own personality regarding content and style. Experimenting with different looks is good.

As is a proficiency that shows you've already started a basic foundation that could show indications of talent and ability to spend time working on the art. You know, so the people are going to be evaluating your work, going to be looking at those things. This is where it is critical that you not rely on AI for anything and your art submission is all your ideas. Styles, and even a sense of craft.

Be diligent about excluding AI, especially for many written materials such as essays or an artist statement. So those are two critical things, an essay or the artist statement. That needs to be yours.

AI artist statements and essays are becoming clones of each other, And if there are 50 openings for students and 50 of the essays are identical, that will stand out as the essays written by a real person will stand out. You'll be able to see it. I mean, I know this from personal experience because I've seen it myself. You know, it wasn't 50 of them. I think we had 37 applicants.

Applications that were easily identifiable as being written by artificial intelligence. No human wrote those submissions, you know. And so we faculty, we didn't know what to make about that, you know, at first going, wait a second, this is about creativity and these students are using AI to write these really critical statements. And that was not okay. You know, that was not all right with us.

And what will stand out are the essays written by a real person. The canned AI submissions will often become stale and boring, especially when the stack of submissions are obviously nearly all written by AI. Don't do it. Write your own material, you know, because in spite of, you know, students or potential students thinking, you know, that they're disguising, you know, their submissions as being authored by them. It's very, very easily recognizable as being written by AI.

It's crazy how easy it is.

When you're accepted and are doing student assignments, it's critical to avoid using AI. Except when it's part of the requirements. In order to truly learn the content, it's imperative that you exercise your creativity and push it as far as you can. With my own classes, students were required to use AI in conjunction with their own creative work. This goes hand in hand with the perception that AI is here to stay.

And it's in your own benefit to learn how to use it well. Learn its strengths and push them further. AI is a very nuanced tool, and your competitors are going to know how to use it. In order to succeed as an artist, you'll have the same edge as other people with AI skills. What will set you apart is your ability to use AI and to perfect it so that what you create is yours.

You know, for an example, AI may be viewed as a crude version of an early draft, and your task is to personalize and bring it to where it needs to be with originality, creativity, and personal ownership. You know, so you need to do those things. I'm saying this to the young people, you know, who are going to be trying to build a future for themselves.

Okay, so I'm going to shift to being a practicing artist. I'm going to jump ahead to being a practicing artist. There are a few commonalities with what you need to be using on a regular basis, and this has to do with interacting with museums, galleries, collectors, Art historians and organizations may assist with things like grants, fellowships, exhibitions, publications, and so forth. So in other words, all the things that it takes to be a practicing professional artist.

The three essential items that are needed on a revolving basis are bio, you know, a biography, a resume, and an artist statement. Those are the three biggies. Everyone always wants them. Universities want them for submission materials. If you're writing a grant, guess what they ask for?

They ask for a bio, an artist statement, and a resume. I'm going to talk about the artist statement just really briefly. It's what you need to author yourself because authenticity is an important aspect of all of it. Writing an artist statement is an acquired skill that takes practice. You can't just say, "Okay, I'm going to write an artist statement," and just kind of scribble something out.

That's not how it works. It's something that takes a lot of work. You have to write a lot of drafts, and at its best, you get critical feedback from people that you respect, you know, give you honest feedback about its strengths and so forth.

You need to know the essence of what the content is, how to describe the look of any meanings that are embedded in the work.

Describing art is an acquired skill too. The way I tell my students about describing art, saying, "You know who writes, or who talks, who makes the best descriptions? 10-Year-olds." 10-year-olds make the best descriptions of all. I gave the example. I said, "One time I was driving the boys home, my son, and there was 3 of his buddies were in the back seat." They're all animated.

They're all excited about the movie they just saw. Each one of them described their favorite part of the movie. I thought, "Wow, I wish my students could do that." That means if you want to learn an essential part of an artist statement, you need that 10-year-old's ability to describe something that's really exciting to you. You know, so, and I love the simplicity of that and how it really is about, you know, morphing back into that 10-year-old and bringing that passion, you know, bringing that fire into the description. So that's it.

It's describing something, something that 10-year-olds, you know, after I, you know, described that to my class, I said, "Wow, you know what? I'd like to bring them into this class." never just talk about it, you know, because that would have been the best thing of all.

If you apply for grants or fellowships, everyone's going to be asked about an artist statement. They not only want to know what your art is about, they also want to know how— sometimes you'll be asked for something specific, like a 50-word version Perhaps even a two-sentence version. One of the other examples I like to give is when you're a practicing artist and you're trying to make a living as an artist, guess what one of the New Deals is? It's nearly impossible to meet a curator. It's just, even for a practicing artist like me, their time has become so taken up that they don't have the regular time that they used to have to sit down and just talk face-to-face with artists.

I tell my students, my undergrads, when they're learning how to do artist statements, to say, "Here's what's going to work for you. You're going to encounter a curator at an unexpected place." I said, "It happened to me, happened to me just a couple years ago. I was in Washington, D.C.". I was at the Smithsonian and I got in the elevator, just going up to the next floor, and I look next to me and it's the director of the Smithsonian. He's just standing there.

I thought, okay, I'm going to run with this. In 90 seconds, I told him what my art was about. That's based on the skill of writing an artist statement. That's what you get. When you're able to write a one-page artist statement, one of the things that you naturally pick up is how to talk about your own work.

There I was with my golden opportunity. The director is right there. I didn't have anything written or anything. It was totally unscripted, but because I'm used to writing artist statements, I gave him my 90-second you know, description of what my work about. And he stood there with a blank face, you know, listening.

And he got to his floor and he said, "You got a card?" So I dug one out and gave it to him. You know, it was when they were still using business cards, you know. And he said, "We don't have anything now. You know, we're not doing anything with what you were just talking about, but He said, "One of our head curators is bouncing an idea around about what you were just now discussing." He said, "Be expecting to hear from her in about a year." I thought, "Wow, a year? Why does it have to be a year?" So things like that happen.

Because you have that acquired skill, skill, the ability to describe your own work, it led to an exhibition. That's how I got one of my exhibitions at the Smithsonian. How I got my work acquired into their collection happened in an elevator. I tell my students about that. I say, "Yeah, that's why you need to be able to write an artist statement." You're in this to make a living.

It's like, you know what, at some point you're going to want to buy a house, you're going to want to build a house, maybe your kid needs braces like mine did, you know, and all the income from that exhibition went to his braces and stuff, but hey, there it is, making a living as an artist.

How am I doing on time? 5 Minutes, but we could use it for questions if you're—. Okay. Yeah, I wanted to talk about, you know, one really boring thing really quickly though, and that's a resume. And, you know, my advice is use AI to do a first draft of a resume because you know what it's going to do?

It's going to format it. And it's going to format it, and it's going to look beautiful. Because all you got to do is go back and prompt it again and say, nah, that doesn't look good. And you describe it, what you want it to look like. And it'll be formatted in a Word document.

So you can use that format. That means you don't have to be a slave. You don't have to sit there and spend 3 days just formatting this thing, you could— hey, that's one of the strengths of AI is use the inherent strength of it. Okay, so I want to leave at least a little bit of time. There's 5 minutes, right?

Yeah, okay. So yeah, thank you. Questions then? Any questions or comments?

Thank you. I'll get the microphone. Oh, okay. I noticed that— oh, sorry.

I noticed that one of the things that you do as a practice is always update your resume every single show you have every single purchase that somebody makes or whatever, he puts it in the resume so you don't always have to be reviewing it something around. I thought that was a really nice—. Yeah, so I don't know if you guys heard her question, but it had to do with updating your resume. And yeah, that's— I think that's a really nice thing because I update, like Debbie said, I do update mine all the time. And this is from my website.

And I update my own resume 3 times a year, you know, because there's always new things that are happening and so forth. And I put it on my website, you know, hey, it's no secret. You know, I want people to be able to see it. So they go to the website and they scroll down. And you click McNeill CV and it shows up as a PDF document.

I don't see it.

So anyway, it appears as a downloadable PDF document like this.

And I do keep it current. And mine was getting embarrassingly long. And at one point it was 45 pages. So I deleted, you know, like 10 pages of it. You know, who has the time to do that?

So I deleted, you know, all of that older stuff. But anyway, once you do get these documents, you know, it's easy to update them. You know, you go in, you know, for example, A couple of museums acquired some art and, you know, hey, it's good to list that in your resume or CV or you get a fellowship or award or whatever. Yeah. So— and to make it easily downloadable too, you know, so whoever wants to can, you know, download it.

And if they want to copy the formatting, that's okay with me. I have a question for you. So I can tell that you have a piece of paper in front of you with this written out. Did you run that through AI? This?

No, definitely not.

Good question though. Yeah, I hardly have AI draft anything for me.

I just don't think it's up to the task yet. Although, you know what? I've read, I've gone online, and I've seen bios that AI has written about me. So I can recognize that. And I have mixed feelings about it.

So as far as I'm concerned, it's going to happen. Not only is it going to happen, it's already happening. We also have an online question. What about our form line art, and how is AI a threat to copy or redefine the art form? The artist can manipulate form line by 1/16 of an inch and it matters.

It's balance and AI can't do that. Thank you, Dorothy. Yes, I would totally agree with that. I don't think AI has the ability to really do maybe what we could call is a proper form line. At least I haven't seen it yet.

If AI has done some form lines, I'd be curious to see what it looks like. For example, last year I saw some AI form line work and it looked like it was cartoons, you know, and it just didn't get it, you know. So maybe that has to do with the human element, you know, being able to— understand that the form line is not just a formula. It's not just a formula, not by any means. That's why we have so many Northwest Coast artists who have such different styles.

They've developed their own styles and worked decades, decades to perfect it. Any other questions in the room? All right, why don't we thank Larry for his amazing speech. All right, thank you. Thank you very much.

Appreciate it.