Instructor creator Jason Liu floats hypothetical OpenAI arts grants, prompting proposals to fund artists pushing prompting limits
OpenAI has not announced any official arts grant program.
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@jxnlco Clay does this in a creative way cc/ @jeffbarg
I don’t think openai should bother with a small fellowship or you know here’s $20k go make something w/ chatgpt. it’s costly to do this poorly imo. think maecenas w/ virgil and horace, think bell labs, think wpa in the great depression, creating shelter where work can be made
the framing should be around funding artists as human/taste researchers in an era of just sheer machine abundnce. which I think is novel and specific and allows openai to step into artistic leadership.
give composers and filmmakers and poets and installation artists and world builders access to frontier models, engineers, education, compute, datasets, legal sup, and of course, distribution + time. so the grant is the offer of ~capability (which to me sounds so absolutely incredible)
riffing on that it could be artists residencies INSIDE the lab, public commissions of work where the work is documented in its process/creation state (operas, games, monuments), artists preservation grants (think this is soooo underrated and important, local languages or dying craft, oral histories being lost 🥲), I mean there’s lots of angles that feel larger than, you know, here’s money to make x thing.
ultimately the question I think I’d want asked if I was at openai is how can we create a patronage system that fundamentally could NOT exist without frontier models. v branded and v culturally important
that’s the most novel and sharp form of it imo!!
@jxnlco From the perspective of a profoundly disabled artist’s parent, OpenAI could do something maybe no other organisation can: build tools that help artists communicate, create, and advocate for themselves. Not just “AI art grants,” but adaptive systems for non-speaking, autistic, >
@jxnlco
in terms of thinking big and ambitious and getting inspired about art/making, I like looking at these orgs and their instagrams for inspiration:
Loewe Foundation (Craft Prize) https://craftprize.loewe.com/en/craftprize2026
Prada Foundation (Film Fund) https://www.fondazioneprada.org/?lang=en
Frieze London https://www.frieze.com/article/funds-prizes-collaborations-frieze-london-frieze-masters-2025
its nice that / nicer tuesdays https://www.itsnicethat.com/
Creative Applications https://www.creativeapplications.net/community/
Rhizome https://rhizome.org/
Modem Works https://modemworks.com/
in terms of actually instantiating a grant program at OpenAI, I think maybe Eclipse Grants (Moth Fund), Nautilus, Verci, Analogue, and Berggruen are interesting and tasteful organisations to draw inspiration from. tbh this is more the vibe of SF:
Eclipse Grants https://www.mothfund.com/eclipse
Nautilus https://nautilus.quest/
Verci https://www.verci.com/
Analogue https://analoguegroup.org/
Berggruen https://berggruen.org/eu
I also think it would be cool to have a physical space to display work, host community events, hang outs, workshops etc. maybe reach out to https://x.com/imempowa about https://www.tiat.place/ (based in SF).
I think the grants should be at the intersection of art x technology. try to discover completely new art formats that are enabled by technology/AI. find the most unique and interesting people, like a Thiel Fellowship but for artists, misfits, hackers, creative technologists. you could profile them, share their work on the OpenAI insta, have an in-person demo day/gallery. you can start out super minimal like AI Grant (Nat/Daniel). but the long term vision I think is something massive like a world class San Francisco-based art institution like MoMa or Tate Modern. the OpenAI Foundation will have enough resources to do this one day.
@jxnlco I don’t see how it works. Most of the arts don’t have an end state, summarising the literature is helpful but you’re usually explicitly trying for the novel. It’s why AI movies look like Hollywood but leave you cold. The human experience is the key.
@jxnlco Sponsor indie game and movie creators pushing the boundaries with AI. Give them exposure outside of the usual platforms (Eg, Steam and YouTube) which generally punish content made with AI assistance. Create a mentorship community of AI-curious creatives around it.
@jxnlco early access to models, unlimited usage for recipients. recipients must document and share their creative process. in my case we run a film festival in Australia/APAC and it was very disappointing to see Sora go.
https://www.omnifilmfestival.com/
@danacbryce @jxnlco The problem is that humanities and the arts deal with topics that are computationally irreducible — and there’s no way around it.
@jxnlco it would be amazing for writers, playwrights and artists to get access to base models so that we can tap into language and writing that isn't so assistant-like.
@jxnlco I hope games count as art for this one
I'd make novel but unprofitable futuristic games that are tokenmaxxing
@jxnlco modal are a good example https://modal.art/
@jxnlco
@jxnlco i have some ideas
@jxnlco lemme apply early & i will show how FL Studio is done with the agents
@jxnlco When do we get an artificial intelligence music festival where artists and musicians meet nerds and tech gods, then we all learn stuff in the middle? No? It doesn't work that way? Those guys just want to waste time, huh.
@jxnlco fund sf artists only, similar to the way soho changed. Strongest taste people at oai are given a budget to deliver to artists with low oversight. artists don’t need to use AI but are given unlimited tokens during an allotted window if they want
@jxnlco yes
@jxnlco Unlimited or ultra generous tokens for artistic use, featuring artists and how they incorporate ChatGPT/codex into their work flows. Even if their use isn’t to create art with ai, many artists struggle with the business aspect. Codex can handle that.
@jxnlco soft power