Suzy Easton watched the Grimes interview I sent her, then went back and read the whole transcript. “Had to nerd out for sure,” she wrote. Then the quotes started arriving. One. Then another. Then the first one again with the full context. Then “okay wait one more.”
Suzy and I have been going back and forth about Grimes for months, ever since we made I AM NOMAD together for the BC + AI Film Club. Suzy’s an admitted fan. In May she told our AI music group she kind of wants to be like Grimes when she grows up in her AI life. I’m a more complicated listener. I find Grimes fascinating, I disagree with her about plenty, and I keep paying attention anyway. This interview earned the attention.
It’s Andrew Callaghan’s Channel 5, posted November 6: almost two hours with Grimes and the comedian Ivy Wolk, late at night in an apartment. A lot of it has nothing to do with AI. Some of it I’d argue with for an hour. But four moments in there have been rattling around my head since Suzy sent them, because they describe the work a bunch of us have been doing in Vancouver for three years.
“Why aren’t there more artists here?”
About ten minutes in, Callaghan asks what first pulled Grimes toward tech ethics. She says that once she started meeting the people building this stuff, her first reaction was: why aren’t there more artists here? She calls it a crazy fertile topic. It touches everybody, it’s intensely emotional, it’s straight out of science fiction, and the artists are mostly somewhere else.
Then she says the part Suzy flagged. The tech people she knows love literature and cinema, the cerebral forms. Play them music and she gets a shrug. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone like feel anything about music really.” Her theory, which she hedges hard and calls anecdotal, is that if music isn’t your language, you might honestly not understand why so many people are distressed by the idea of non-human entities mastering it. For a lot of people, she says, music is a fundamental human language.
I’ll hedge it too. I know engineers who’d weep at the right song. But I recognize the gap she’s pointing at. I wrote a version of it after Futureproof: a journalist asks where the information came from, and an artist asks what the thing feels like. When nobody in the room is asking the second question, you get products that are technically brilliant and emotionally tone-deaf, and then everyone acts shocked when the public hates them.
Some of the artists are already here
I’d answer Grimes this way. Some of the artists are already in tech. They’re just not on the keynote stage.
Suzy played bass in the Vancouver bands Minto and Seafoam, toured across Canada, turned up on MuchMusic, and recorded in Chicago with Steve Albini (her records are here). She studied classical music at Douglas College, then jazz and composition. She’s played punk rock. She used to build guitar pedals out of toasters. She’s also spent more than twelve years in QA automation, IT operations and support engineering, the people who keep fragile systems standing while everyone else is asleep.
That’s an artist in tech. There are a lot of them. The industry mostly hires them to test the thing and almost never asks them what the thing is for.
This year Suzy found out her old band’s music was being used without the band’s consent. Their singer died of cancer a couple of years ago, and she told our music group how strange it felt that his voice might be out there being used. She took it to SOCAN, who told her the Albini session was a likely reason the band got scraped, and said they’d use the story in their push with government. The session that made the record special may be the reason it got taken.
She tried Suno this summer, too, and found that describing music to it was “not quite working.” It sent her back to composing, and to pieces like one she wrote in 2011. And when another band asked her to join and she said no, because she was going to build music hardware for AI, some of her peers got mad at her.
That’s the toll for engaging. You hear about it from both sides.
Suzy called it first
What she’s building is the clearest answer I know to Grimes’s question. At BC + AI Office Hours in October, Suzy described a local-first music app that treats AI less like prompt-and-get-a-song and more like “an actual instrument,” built around her own sounds, her own musical decisions and her own taste. She introduced our AI + Music group at the September Vancouver AI meetup around the same idea: we are the instrument. Her Loop Lab, a little browser tape machine with “no AI costume,” has the best tagline on the internet: “make a noise. keep the good bit. ruin it carefully.”
The funny part is that she got there before Grimes said it on camera. In August, Suzy told the music room that Grimes had landed in a similar place: the best use of generative music is making samples, not songs. She also loved Grimes’s rights model, the open offer to use her AI voice and split master royalties 50/50 on anything commercially released. “Super explicit consent, super explicit value exchange,” Suzy wrote. In this interview Grimes says it again. She doesn’t much care about AI songs, she thinks the best application is samples, and she doesn’t think the public wants a song somebody made by pressing a button. That’s the same line I drew in Artists Learn. Machines Extract.: consent, credit, compensation and transparency.
Grimes also says the artists she knows who understand AI best are producers, because production is a tech-coded, self-taught art form. “I play a computer basically,” she says. She credits GarageBand and Napster for making her possible at all. Suzy kept making that access argument in our music group: for a lot of artists, the fight is about access and autonomy, and about making work the traditional systems won’t fund or even cheer for.
Somebody at the table raises the fear a lot of artists carry: mastery stops mattering once a machine has absorbed everybody’s. Kerris Hougardy made the workplace version of that point at Futureproof. We keep saying the future belongs to human skills, she said, and then we hand people tools that reward the opposite. An instrument is the other kind of tool. It’s useless without your hands, and it gets better as you do.
“We’re innovating in emotions”
This is the line Suzy sent first, then sent again with the context around it:
“I think the sort of the gentler the simpler art forms can speak a lot to like things that can’t be communicated with words. I think a lot of this stuff is just really emotionally confusing. Like, you know, we’re innovating in emotions and the world is innovating in emotions. Like we’re going through all these emotions that could not be accessed before.”
She says it right after admitting she feels bad when somebody scrolling YouTube runs into her talking about existential terror. Later she says her new record is about emotionally processing all of this: the future of emotions, AI psychology, machine consciousness.
I think she’s right, and I think it cuts both ways.
At Futureproof, Dr. Angelica Lim from SFU’s ROSIE Lab shared early results from a study where people talked to ChatGPT’s voice mode for ten minutes. When they talked about something they loved, rather than a neutral topic, they reported more of a shared reality with the chatbot, more warmth, more flow. Those are the same signals relationship researchers use to predict who calls for a second date. Her lab is studying how that slides into what psychiatrists call AI-associated delusions. Whatever is or isn’t happening inside the machine, she said, it makes us feel a certain way.
So yes, we’re innovating in emotions. Some of that innovation is being done to us, at scale, by products that make money when we keep talking. That’s why the gentle, simple art forms matter so much right now. A song gives a feeling somewhere to live before you have words for it. A song doesn’t need you to come back tomorrow. Amber Case opened Futureproof by asking us to remember the sunset so beautiful we forgot to take a picture. That kind of feeling is worth protecting, and you can’t design to protect it if nobody in the room can hear it.
Philosophers and diplomats
Near the end, Grimes gets to diplomacy. She describes labs, governments and investors treating each other as competition, zero-sum all the way down, and says “there should be a bunch of philosophers and a bunch of diplomats at like probably any big company.” People thinking hard about moral philosophy, about execution, about talking to competitors and to government.
Suzy said this one felt like my work. She’s not wrong.
BC + AI has a philosophy group. Loki Jorgenson runs Mind, AI and Consciousness, and it meets every month. He opened day two of Futureproof with a status report from a group designing toward machine consciousness: memory, a sense of time, a module that registers when something goes badly. The detail that stayed with me was the empty chair. Their ethics lead had left, and they were looking for a new one. He closed by saying people are already designing and building this. That isn’t necessarily how we should behave, he said, but it is how we are.
There’s Grimes’s case for philosophers, live on stage. If the thing you’re building might be able to have a bad day, somebody in the building should be paid to ask whether you ought to build it, and should have the standing to say stop. I’d add one thing to her version. The philosophers can’t only live on the payroll. They need public rooms where builders have to answer them.
Diplomats, too. I don’t have the title, but a lot of what BC + AI does is carry messages between rooms that don’t talk to each other. This year I marched through Vancouver with a crowd chanting “Fuck AI.” I caught Evan Solomon in a Montreal hallway for two minutes. At AI Day in Robson Square, the slide behind me was protest chalk from a Montreal sidewalk: there is no slogan that gets us out of doing the governance. On Monday I photographed students with pots and pans in UBC’s Nest, protesting an AI summit. Each of those rooms thinks the others don’t get it. Somebody has to keep walking between them.
“If you don’t engage”
The last line Suzy sent comes while Grimes is defending her own involvement with tech. She brings up Anthropic refusing, in her telling, to do surveillance and autonomous weapons, and the people who tell her to just not engage. “Everyone not engaging is how you get these bad things happening,” she says. Good people should engage, build good things and set good precedents.
I’ve been saying a version of this all year: get in the room, because the room is making decisions whether you’re there or not. Engaging doesn’t mean putting the critique down. You walk in with both hands full, curiosity in one and care in the other, and you don’t let go of either. Grimes spends a good chunk of the same interview on guilt by association, which is the toll for walking in. I think it’s worth paying. And I’d trust a room with a few more bass players in it.
Bring an instrument
So why aren’t there more artists in tech? Some are already here, running the tests. Some are in rooms where nobody asks them what the thing should feel like. And some, like Suzy, got tired of waiting to be asked and started building the instrument themselves.
If you’re a musician who’s been told to pick a side, come find Suzy and the AI + Music crew at BC + AI. Bring an instrument. Bring a toaster. We’ll figure out how to plug it in.
Here’s what happened the last time Suzy and I got in a room with these tools:
The interview: Grimes Interview (Ft. Ivy Wolk), Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan. The moments in this post are at 9:46, 10:42, 28:17, 1:03:04 and 1:41:47. Explore the Futureproof 2026 program and photos.
Written with AI assistance from the interview transcript, Suzy’s notes, Futureproof session transcripts and my own earlier posts.
