There’s a moment, about five minutes in to one of the most recent episodes of the podcast Interdependence, when the usual banter is brushed aside and the real stakes of the conversation become clear. “People are still talking about music,” cohost Mat Dryhurst says, “as if the world hasn’t changed significantly.”

For some years now, there have been few surer guides to the significance of that change than Dryhurst and his partner, the award-winning performer and composer Holly Herndon. Ever since 2020, Herndon and Dryhurst have uploaded new episodes of Interdependence once every week or so, featuring conversations with the likes of artificial intelligence (AI) researcher François Pachet, performance artist Marina Abramović and Taiwan’s inaugural minister of digital affairs, Audrey Tang. At times, the couple seem to be so far ahead of the curve that a note of frustration creeps into their voices at the rest of the world’s failure to see just how far the social and technological goalposts have shifted.

I first interviewed Herndon and Dryhurst back in 2013, at the time of her album Movement. At that time, other than as a tool for “smashing things together” and creating subtly shifting “textural elements,” artificial intelligence–type tools were not playing “a huge part” in Herndon’s music, she told me. But in the years since, the technology has moved fast. In November 2018, just as new kinds of large language models were being invented by corporations like Google and OpenAI, Herndon posted on Twitter: “AI is a deceptive, over abused term. Collective Intelligence (CI) is more useful. It’s often just us (our labor/data), in aggregate, harnessed to produce value by a few, who maybe have an easier time acting with impunity because we are distracted by fairytales about sentient robots.” Less than a week later, she released the first video from her third album Proto, a record which tackled these issues head-on.