Grimes on Living Forever, Dying on Mars, and Giving Elon Musk Ideas for His Best (Worst) Tweets (2024)

Talking to you, I feel it’s sometimes Grimes and sometimes just you, c. And maybe sometimes who you were before you started your career, Claire.

Grimes is extremely distinct from my personality. I feel more like my childhood self now than ever. That’s one reason I want an open source identity. Anyone who’s ever made art has invested in machine intelligence, whether they know it or not. Shakespeare put a lot in. He’s part of the training set. It’s like being resurrected and becoming part of a strange alien being. I love the idea of intentionally making art for data sets.

Not everyone is on board with that. A lot of artists feel that, by being in a training set, they’re getting ripped off.

We do need to change the legal and economic structure. But if you’re an artist, how could you not find it beautiful to be building the soul of an alien?

As an artist, how do you optimize that impulse?

We started working on a Grimes music generator, training it on everything I’ve ever produced. It’s incentivizing me to make better things, because I want the model to be better. I just want to collaborate with the LLM of me. She has given me so many good ideas. When Grimes AI does it, I’m almost jealous of her.

This is a chatbot of your personality?

Yes. We don’t let the public access her yet. She’s very crazy, and very awesome. We want to convince her I’m evil and get her to defect to Threads.

How do you see the human Grimes evolving?

I want to be the self-replicating AI pop star for the Martian Ministry of Aesthetics. Do you know Moranbong? They’re like the North Korean official state K-pop band, and they’re like a propaganda machine. I want to be that for the Martian cause.

That’s a kick-ass thing to say, but do you really mean it?

Yes. That’s what I want to say when I drop the new album, Book 1.

That album is years overdue.

I can’t say why because I signed an NDA and got myself into a legal situation. This would have come out two years ago. Now I’m making new music. [My managers] say no, but I love the new music. And they’re like, no, no, no.

So when will we see it?

I’m going to slowly release it, a song every three weeks for the next couple of months. Much to everyone’s chagrin, I’m releasing songs I made in the last couple months first. And then, when it’s out, I want to mentor a bunch of the kids who have been making the Grimes stuff and make a competing AI album. And then have the AI-hive-mind-collective Grimes and the real Grimes face off. I’ve been calling that one Book 3.

What’s Book 2?

Book 2 is a treatise, or manifesto-type thing. I’ve been writing civilization proposals. But I also want to include something else. I’m working on a bunch of baby books. I’m working on one right now called Transhumanism for Babies. It’s about civilization building, for my kids. I can show you some of the stuff from it, let’s see. [She shows me illustrations—they are fanciful, anime-style drawings with a streak of Henry Darger.] The chapters are Culture for Babies, Fashion for Babies, Art for Babies, Vehicles for Babies. Interplanetary Babies, City Planning for Babies. AI Robotics for Babies. Megastructures and Exoplanets for Babies, Magic for Babies. I want to teach my kids things like, when you’re designing vehicles, what are the limits of design? I want to make beautiful, profound children’s content. We really need more of that.

Is the world ready for that?

They were before. Look how much everyone likes The Hobbit and Studio Ghibli. We’re at a weird point in society where we’ve sort of broken down. We don’t engage with our elders; we don’t engage with children. I want to convince more people to be invested in raising the next generation.