PODCAST: AI & The City—Anthea Foyer

A couple of weeks ago, I moderated a panel at the VRTO Spatial Media Conference at OCAD University about the evolution of value in the age of AI. One of my panelists was Anthea Foyer, who leads the Creative Technology Office at the City of Toronto.

I found her ideas fascinating. Partly because I didn’t really know the City of Toronto had a Creative Technology Office. But mostly because of the way Anthea thinks about creativity, technology, and public life. She talked about embracing the weird, she talked about convening, and she talked about what happens when we stop treating AI as a force that is simply happening to artists and start asking how creative communities might actually help shape what comes next.

So, obviously, I invited her onto the podcast. Anthea’s office supports Toronto’s creative technology sectors, including immersive media, video games, esports, and emerging forms of digital entertainment. She is also the city’s focal point for Toronto’s UNESCO City of Media Arts designation and a co-founder of Future Makers, a creative foresight initiative developed with Toronto Metropolitan University’s Creative School.

What interested me most was how Anthea and her colleagues have changed the way they bring AI into conversations with creative people. When you invite people to an event about AI, she says, they often arrive with a position already formed. They’re excited. They’re angry. They’re worried. They’re skeptical. So instead, Future Makers began asking people to imagine the future of their creative industries. AI was still in the room.

It just wasn’t always the headline. That shift opened up a much more interesting question:

What kind of creative future do we actually want to make?

In this conversation, we discuss:

* Why conversations about AI become so polarized

* What happens when artists actually get to touch and test the tools

* The difference between art made by AI and art made by artists using AI

* Whether algorithms are expanding creative possibility or making culture more homogenous

* Why Toronto should make more room for the strange, experimental, and weird