The all-seeing AI webcam

On this episode of The Vergecast, senior producer Will Poor explores the AI-tinged worlds of Dries Depoorter. Depoorter has built all manner of quirky and provocative installations and online experiments. There’s a clock that tells you how much of your life you’ve already lived; a phone charger that only works when your eyes are closed; a mobile chat app that you can only use when your phone has less than 5% battery. His most eyebrow-raising work, though, is around AI and surveillance. In his projects Depoorter takes publicly available webcam footage from around the world, and uses it to stalk celebrities, catch jaywalkers in the act, keep politicians honest, and generally make you wonder about your own privacy and anonymity. We talked with Depoorter about how he creates his work, how he thinks about the future of AI, and how he responds to the people who see his art and want to turn it into commerce. It’s a wild conversation, so check it out above. To see all of Dries’ work, head over to his portfolio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:32David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of streaming services that are just the living rooms of strangers through their webcams. I'm your friend David Pierce and this is the second episode in our three-part series about AI. Like I mentioned last week, we're trying to find ways to make AI sort of real and in the world. We talk about AI in these like big, huge, sprawling ways. We wanted to see if we could find three stories about how AI is actually being used by actual people in the actual world. And for this one, our second one, Will Poor has a story. Hi, Will.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 1:04David Pierce?

  So if memory serves, at the beginning of this, we tasked you with not just like finding a story about an AI app, but like doing something, doing something different. Like, let's, let's see where AI is being used that isn't just to like write slightly better business emails.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20David Pierce?

  What'd you find?

• 1:21Speaker 02

  I went as far afield as I could go. I wanted to get away from the hype and skepticism cycle around all the AI tools that we're talking about, get away from all the product announcements that we're following. I wanted to make AI kind of unfamiliar to myself again. And a coworker, as I was chatting about this, reminded me of this thing that got shared around The Verge a ton a couple of years ago. It was a project that was called The Follower and it used facial recognition to match social media photos to open webcam footage. So basically this thing looked at unsecured webcams in like Times Square and then it

• 2:05Speaker 02

  looked at public Instagram photos taken at the same time in the same place and used facial recognition to match up the people that appeared in both feeds. So you got this creepy second angle on social media posts that came from these unsecured webcams.

• 2:22David Pierce?

  Oh, man. That's one of those things that it's like you put all this information on the internet and you sort of exist in the world, knowing that there are lots of cameras around. But I feel like nobody ever thinks about it. And like, we've talked about this a lot on this show that like having computers collect information about you is one thing and it feels bad, but you don't really think about it. But then when it shows it back to you.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:42David Pierce?

  It becomes, it feels different, right? Like it becomes visceral in a way that feels almost like horrifying, even though you're like, well, yeah, I took that picture and put it on the internet.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Completely. And for it to be paired with, as you say, these webcam feeds that you know in the abstract are out there everywhere and following you around. But you just don't have evidence of you out there in them. And that's what this does. So if you scroll through this project. I saw this one photo of a guy in a leather jacket who's casually leaning against this famous bar in Dublin. It's a very standard sort of social media post. But then in the camera footage, you get to watch him try out different poses and angles. He A B tests jacket or no jacket when he's taking this picture. You see how the social media post came to be. There's this other

• 3:34Speaker 02

  shot of these very two cool hip guys strolling through Times Square. It's really epic looking. But then in the webcam footage, you see them just walking through busy Times Square. They almost bump into someone who's wheeling luggage around. It is just like, it totally changes your view on social media posts and how they came to be.

• 3:55David Pierce?

  That thing is like a shtick of some social media posts. Like I saw a TikTok the other day that was a person explaining how to sleep in an airport. And she like, you know, put her bags on and attached everything to her in such a way that it would be hard to get off of her, puts on her eye mask and puts up her hood and goes to sleep. And then it was stitched by somebody who like walks over, waves in her face and then just steals her phone. And it's like the like pulling back the curtain on how this stuff actually works is like part of how this all works on the internet. But the people doing it are still the ones in control. This is just like the world is telling on you in a way that it kind of like, like there are people who would make those behind the scenes video of them doing the 10 different tries, the blooper reel and whatever. But when it's somebody else doing it to you because they saw it happen.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like if that person stitching the TikTok was actually there for the recording of the first TikTok and messing with the person as they were doing it, which is just next level weird and creepy.

• 4:50David Pierce?

  Seriously.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  That's what I gravitated towards because it's all of this very publicly available data plus AI equals weird disconcerting stuff. And I just, I figured whoever made that, whoever made the follower would have a lot of very different, very interesting thoughts on AI. So I called him up and talked to him about it.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Just to get started, start with the hardest question first. Just tell me your name and what you do.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  My name is Drise Porzys and I'm an artist working with technology.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Drise is 33 years old. He lives in Belgium and for more than a decade, he's been using technology in ways that are inspiring, silly and kind of disturbing. His work is this unique mix of technical proficiency and outlandish ideas.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  So I have a background in electronics. I studied electronics for six years, really loved it. I was really enjoying experimenting with electronics, but I missed a sort of creativity. So after I was graduated, I went to an art school. There was like a really weird switch. I was studying media arts and I really loved it. It was something totally different.

• 6:19Speaker 03

  After that, I went to an advertising company and I worked for two years as a concept provider. That's someone that's come up with with ideas for the for the agency.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  So that's the fuel mixture for this guy. Electronics plus art plus weird concepts. When I scrolled through Drees's portfolio, the first concepts that caught my eye weren't actually AI-powered. Lots of his ideas are these simple clever conceits brought to life. They're little bubble universes that play by one or two really simple rules. Like, he built this interactive exhibit called Recharge. It's a phone charger that only works when your eyes are closed. In the gallery, you lie back in a lawn chair and plug your phone into an outlet. But there's a camera pointed at your head and a computer running face-tracking software. So the exhibit only sends electricity to the outlet if your eyes

• 7:12Speaker 02

  are closed. He also made a website that you can take over and post anything you want, but only if you have more followers on X than the last person to do that. The latest person to post is a guy named Kev Adams, who just wrote Subscribe to Kev Adams. One other project that I still can't get out of my head is a little gadgety-looking LED clock in a classy wooden frame that Drees actually makes and sells.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  So I have a project called Short Life. It's a clock. It's a clock that shows a percentage. And that's a personal percentage because it shows how much of your life that is already completed based on your life expectancy in your country. I have like different people that order it. Like, sometimes I have fathers that bought it for the newborn. Or this year, I sold the clock for someone that has more than 120%. So that that person was 108 years old.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  And I will only sell 1 million.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Just one, just 1 million.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  It's a limited edition. Only 1 million.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Order now before it's too late. If it's not clear from all these projects, Drees loves the elegance of a good, simple idea brought to life through lots of tinkering.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  The first ideas, most of the time, really complex. But then I try to...

• 8:43Speaker 03

  Make them really small. For me, it's important that I can explain the idea in one sentence. I also have this notes app in my phone and I note a lot of random ideas. Most of the time, they're really bad ideas.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  And what I do is I always go back to their list. And what I do is combining two bad ideas together. That makes like a better idea.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Do you have an example of two bad ideas that made one good idea?

• 9:15Speaker 03

  I think a good example here was an app that I developed named Die With Me. And Die With Me is an app which you can only use when you have less than 5% battery on your phone. If you have less than 5% battery on your phone, you can start chatting to other people having a battery below 5%. How I came up with this idea, I was in a city where I was not able to find my way back

• 9:45Speaker 03

  to my hotel because my phone died. And for me, that was really inspiring. And I was like, okay, I'm like really, I really, really depended on my phone. I'm even not able to find my way back. And then I had this idea like, okay, I will make an app that you can only use when you have a low battery. And I noted that later, that night in my phone. And I think it was on my phone for like more than a year. Because I was not able to find like a good idea with it. Because I had like only this concept of, okay, let's build an app which you can only use when you have less than 5% battery.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  But I was like, really, okay, it needs to be like a dating app or sort of a game. But that was really not perfect for me. It didn't click or something. And then I had like a vague idea of like a chat app. And then I just, one day I was reading through all the ideas and then it clicked like, okay, Die With Me is like a chat app. That's the best concept.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Of all the ideas that Dries mixes and matches in his work, there are two that just seem to keep coming up over and over again. AI and surveillance. He says he got started down this path after making a discovery on one of the sketchier corners of the internet.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  During my work at the advertising agency, I was really into exploring open cameras. When I talk about open cameras, I'm talking about cameras that are connected to the internet with a standard password or no password at all.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  How did you discover them and what was so exciting about that resource?

• 11:37Speaker 03

  I discovered them through a website called Shodan. It's a sort of a search engine, but it doesn't index websites, but it indexes machines on the internet. So with this tool, you are able to find open cameras. You find cameras in living rooms and places where people, I think, don't want to have that publicly open.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  I checked out this website, Shodan, and it is exactly how Dries describes it. After just a couple of clicks, I found myself browsing webcams that definitely aren't supposed to be public. Some were innocuous, like close-up bird feeder cams, but I also watched people playing with dogs inside a doggy daycare business. There was another camera in a living room that I could control, like pan it around. I got really weirded out and closed all the tabs. Shodan is a site that you could do deeply sketchy things with. And this is a personal nightmare of mine, that I don't know enough about how my own gadgets work or have enough of a handle on the tech around me generally, that I'm somehow

• 12:51Speaker 02

  broadcasting myself out into the world without realizing it. Like, I'm a sticky note on my webcam person. I'm superstitious about all of it.

• 13:00David Pierce?

  Okay, but wait, hold on, Will, hang on.

• 13:03David Pierce?

  Let's talk about how superstitious this actually is, right? Because there is a thing happening with all of these AI companies that there is this incredible race to get tons of data. A vast amount of that data that is just like a thing that someone made that is finished on the internet, right?

• 13:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:18David Pierce?

  We kind of know what to do with an article or even like a YouTube video. But the idea of all of these webcams around just collecting data all the time. Like, if you think about live video as just a live stream of data, it feels very different to me.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:33David Pierce?

  Like you're saying, like, you're finding these things where I think lots of people are setting up webcams and don't know. Like, we've all heard the horror stories over the years about people who are hacking into other people's, like, baby monitors and all kinds of stuff. And so, part of me is, I'm not really a tinfoil hat kind of person, but the idea of these are unbelievable fountains of data, plus there are more and more compelling reasons for people to want to get access to and store forever all of that data, feels kind of terrifying, especially then if you can figure out how to ask kind of the right questions of all of that stuff. Like, maybe that's the challenge there is, we're gonna end up with just 100 years of Times Square, and then the question is like, well, what do we, what do we do with any of this? But it's all there. You just have to know what to do with it, right?

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, well, first of all, thank you for cosigning my paranoia.

• 14:21David Pierce?

  I mean, it's funny, I'm not, I'm not a sticky note of the webcam. Yeah, yeah. Like, it's, I never really have been. My sense is like, I'm not quite in the "I have nothing to hide" camp, but I'm in the, like, as long as I'm reasonably responsible, it's probably gonna be fine camp. But like, I've been to Times Square. There is probably video footage of me in Times Square or something.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:45David Pierce?

  And I, that is where it's like, okay, it's, it's no longer just like a thing that I'm in relative control of and should avoid making mistakes. It's just like, being a person in the world, you become training data.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I mean, that just fans, I, I don't, I think you're right that, that the vulnerability of my MacBook camera probably has not changed dramatically with the advent of all of these AI companies who bring up data, but it just fans the flames so much more. Totally. And so like, these are when I, when I look through all of Drees's projects, this is all what comes up for me. And so that's like, that's my reaction to it. And I'm so interested in his work because I think he has all of the same questions that we're asking, but instead of putting sticky notes on his webcams, he made a lot of really fascinating stuff around it.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  I was really inspired by this and it started a lot of my projects around surveillance.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  We need to take a quick break, but when we come back, Drees starts mashing together AI and sketchy webcam feeds, and things get real weird fast.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  Welcome back. We're talking with artist and engineer Drees De Porter. At this point in the story, Drees has discovered a treasure trove of unsecured webcam footage from around the world. And being a tinkerer, he starts to wonder what tools he could build to do fun things with all this raw material.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  So I found an open camera and it was filming a lot of traffic. And I discovered that in the live image, I was seeing a person walking through red lights. And then it inspired me to like, oh, hey, I can automate this. Like, it's really easy to use computer vision to check if the traffic light is green or red. And then... Check if someone is crossing the road. And I made a lot of project around like jaywalking.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  Did you know how to program? Did you know anything about computer vision systems when you had that idea?

• 17:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was exploring a lot, but I always explored with open source tools. So if I need in a project and facial recognition, I don't start writing it from zero. I use something that is out there that I'm able to use. And and and I combine all those tools that are out there. So most of the time I don't need to write everything from zero.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Do you have ideas first and then you go and find the tools that will help you? Or do you learn about a new tool and have an idea? Which comes first?

• 18:03Speaker 03

  Hmm. Yeah, it's most of the time it's me exploring new new technologies. I'm just playing around, even checking out documentation of software, documentation of a new API that is really interesting. Checking out the documentation of chat GPT, the API that's that sparks a lot of ideas for me.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  In this case, he taught himself how to use some computer vision algorithms from an open source library called OpenCV, which by the way is a dizzyingly huge and powerful set of tools. Chat GPT might get more attention these days, but open source libraries like OpenCV are putting things like facial recognition into a lot more hands, for better or worse. Anyway, Dries gave himself a crash course in Python and then used OpenCV to hack together this funny little machine.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  I selected an area where the traffic light is. And then it.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  Sort of counts up all the pixels and it searches for the the main color in that area. If that main color is red, or if it's more red than green, then the software thinks it's like, okay, this is a green or red light. And then it checks in a specific zone if someone is crossing over with the, yeah, person detection.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  But he still needed something to do with his auto jaywalk detector. He needed the second idea to combine with this one. So he added a few more steps and debuted jaywalking.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  It's an interactive installation where you can report jaywalkers from all over the world with the help of open cameras that are pointed to crossroads.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Visitors to the installation stand in a dark room in front of a bright screen playing a stream from an unsecured traffic camera. The screen also displays a big graphic showing whether the stoplight in view is red or green. So participants stand and they watch live as unsuspecting people cross the street. But all the while, there's one other thing in front of them. A big round button on a pedestal, the kind of button that looks so satisfying to hit. What happens if it identifies a jaywalker? What happens next?

• 20:30Speaker 03

  You get the question, would you like to report the jaywalker? And then the visitor of the interactive installation can report the jaywalker by pressing the emergency button. And then it will send an email to the closest police station with a screenshot of the jaywalker and that email address only exists for 10 minutes.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Gotcha. Okay. The system is automatically detecting jaywalkers and it's you're you're forcing a decision by the viewer of the the installation.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  What they want to do with that. Have you like done any machine vision on the installations to know how many people press the button of all the viewers?

• 21:13Speaker 03

  In the beginning, it was not saving this data. Then later, I mean, like the last couple of years, I saved this data and it was a lot exhibited in Belgium and the Netherlands. And what I saw that is that more people in the Netherlands presses than in Belgium.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  AI plus surveillance turned out to be a pretty deep well for Drees. He made an exhibit that tracks celebrities using unsecured camera footage, another that constantly searches webcams for an anonymous man that his sister met once by chance. Both of those are physical installations that are built to run indefinitely in galleries. They're these little purpose-built boxes of electronics with screens that are forever showing live webcam footage. They're constantly on the lookout for whatever their algorithms have been trained to track. They look harmless and contained on their own until you think about what they're actually doing. My favorite Drees project, though, is the entirely virtual Flemish scrollers.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  So the Flemish scrollers is a project that checks the live stream of my government. They have meetings and they live stream this on YouTube. And I meet software that is constantly checking the live stream to find if a politician is on their phone. If they're for a certain amount of minutes on their phone, it will tweet them and tag them with the help of face recognition. And the tweets look like, hey, they're distracted, please stay focused. Then you have like a short video of that person.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  The idea of using these creepy tools for accountability is just so surprising and hilarious to me. I want this in America. I want Congress fully surveilled by AI while they're debating tech policy. It's just too good. So that's my personal favorite. But the piece I wanted to talk the most about was the follower, the one that matches social media posts with camera footage. Drees says that one day, he and his friends were hanging out on a terrace in a touristy area in Portugal, and they were watching people on the street take selfies. And they thought, well, we know where and when those photos are being taken. Can we go find them on social media?

• 23:35Speaker 02

  They poked around for a while and came up empty, but it gave Drees an idea.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  And then actually I did the same, but automated the whole thing. So I found cameras, again, open cameras, where people are taking a lot of photos. And I saved videos for, I think, two or three weeks, something like that. And then at the same time, I saved all the images from that location on Instagram. So all the photos that were tagged with the location around the camera was saved. And then the hardest part, of course, was finding the people in the videos at the right moment.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  The system did its best to match faces between the camera footage and the Instagram photos. Drees says he went through and weeded out false positives. And then he cut the best examples together into a video and he posted it online. And what was the response to it?

• 24:34Speaker 03

  I mean, a lot of people were checking it out the day I launched it. People were really surprised.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  It was a hit, and I get why. It is this one-two punch of a reminder that anonymity is not what you think it is. Especially if you're on social media, but increasingly if you're just alive in the world. The whole thing started a conversation that Drees wasn't totally prepared for.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  There was also like a lot of false information. Like, there was a video saying like, okay, it's an open source tool that works perfectly. And you just need to upload an Instagram photo and it will check all the cameras in the world.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:19Speaker 03

  That was really not the, I mean, that's not the tool I produced.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  It's only working with like specific cameras.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Although if part of your goal is to make people think about what's possible, the version in their head that's bigger and more powerful is also possible technically. So in some senses, do you feel like you're making people think about the bigger, scarier tool, even if the one that you made is smaller?

• 25:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think what is also important to remember is that I'm...

• 25:55Speaker 03

  Only one person producing this. I have limited resources. My skill set is just a basic one. I mean, like, I'm not, it's not a team that built this. It's just like a bit of playing around, I guess.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  I mean, do you want people to think, well, all right, if this was just one person who built this, imagine what a whole team of people can do? Are those questions that you think about?

• 26:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that was something that I saw a lot in the reaction. Like, okay, it's just only one person. Imagine what a government can do.

• 26:33David Pierce?

  Okay, wait, Will, I have just a really quick thought on this, which is, there's this thing that Dries is doing where he's making all this sound really theoretical and sort of, I just did a project. What if other people do this project? But like, this stuff is happening. This is so ingrained in the product of all of this stuff. I mean, we spent all this time talking about Clearview AI, which was just a search engine of people's faces. Like, that is what he's talking about here. Like, it's the same kind of thing and used for, I would say, largely terrifying purposes. We think about, like, Neelai on the show always talks all the time about how his favorite use case for AR is to have it identify people when he's walking past them. So it can be like, oh, who is this person that I've met before? Like, that's the same thing, right? It's a less nefarious version of exactly the same thing.

• 27:19David Pierce?

  Just reminding you of who a person is. These are all two sides of the same coin, but this is the kind of stuff that, like, isn't just happening on Dries's computer to make us wonder about who we are in the world. This is the product in so many ways. And he is right that I think he's at the edge of it in certain ways, but also is like, dude is just building an app that other people are gonna want to use. Is he thinking about how this all feels to him? Like, he is accidentally becoming like a pretty impressive tech developer. Somebody's gonna like... Want to download his apps on the App Store here at some point. How does he feel about all that?

• 28:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's so this is what is so fascinating and kind of frustrating to talk to him is he's doing all of this incredibly relevant stuff with a lot of parallels to things that we talk about daily.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  But when you talk to him, he likes to talk exclusively about how other people respond to this stuff or what other people read into it. And this is where I feel like I completely failed as an interviewer because after an hour of talking to this guy, I couldn't get him to say why he is so interested in surveillance. Or what he finds so powerful, scary, interesting about these tools, what he wants to say about AI. That's just not where he's at as an artist.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  I think it's me exploring. I think the most important thing is I don't want to put like a big message on the project itself. Like you need to to to find. I know which kind of questions it raises, but yeah, I don't answer them.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Dries is so circumspect about his own intentions that he doesn't always seem to know how to handle the response to his work. Take, for example, that project that shows Belgian politicians on their phones.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  There was a person from France, the person had a company. And that person wanted to buy the software to to use on their employees.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  And I was so surprised about this email. Like, I mean, I'm just showing what is possible, but then. There was a long email. I I think it was not a joke at first. I felt like this is a joke, but he had like a lot of cameras in the offices and like. Can I buy your software because I want to use this in my company? That was pretty crazy.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. What did you tell him?

• 29:55Speaker 03

  Uh, I I, to be honest, I didn't reply on this email because I didn't know what to react.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  I I have to imagine that was not the the idea that you wanted to give people necessarily, or do you not think in those terms?

• 30:12Speaker 03

  Well, I think if, I don't, yeah, I don't know.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  But I think if a person really wanted to do this, then he already done it. And but yeah, it was a crazy meal.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  We got to take another break. When we come back, Dries takes on the newest frontiers in AI with the help of a Kylie Jenner voice clone.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Welcome back. As I talked to Dries about his AI projects over the years, it occurred to me that we've been talking primarily about machine vision, which is very powerful and potentially frightening and definitely worth making art about. But it's also not where the AI industry is jangling all of its keys right now. Chat GPT, voice cloning, all the other kinds of generative stuff. That's the dead center of the AI conversation right now. You can't turn around without hearing some AI voice clone of Taylor Swift or Drake singing songs or one of those slightly uncanny valley voices from 11 Labs. All of this struck me as lots more fodder for someone like Dries.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  It feels like a good time to be you. It's just in the in the sense that there are many, many tools being refined all the time, new, new AI related tools coming out, people talking about them, people interested in them, people scared of them. What tools are you interested in? What are you playing around with right now?

• 32:22Speaker 03

  I'm playing around with the voice cloning a lot. I'm I think that's really interesting. For the last couple of months, I'm exploring a lot of open source models that I can run locally. Sometimes they are better than commercial tools. You're way more able to configure them.

• 32:44Speaker 03

  In your style or something, you you have more parameters. That's something I'm exploring.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  Most of his work with generative AI is still in the tinkering stage. Though he posted one very funny demo to his site.

• 32:58Speaker 03

  I um did a project named the selfie coach. I I don't want to call it a project. I don't see it as a final project. It's more like an experiment. And it's a tool that I developed where you can take selfies. But it will give you advice in what to change in the photo. So it takes a photo and then you're smiling and then you get advice from Kylie Jenner with her voice.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  All right, babe, let's get another angle. Okay, ready, three, two, one, pose.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  Drees posted a video of himself testing this out. He poses in front of his webcam, wearing big headphones and looking out of his window. The camera snaps a shot, there's a short pause, and then robot Kylie Jenner does her thing.

• 33:51Speaker 04

  Okay, love the candid vibe, but let's add some drama. Turn towards the light, lose the headphones and think mysterious thoughts to spice it up. Because lighting is everything, babe.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  It uses ChatGPT and a voice cloning service. So first it takes a photo and then the prompt is you are a selfie coach and you are also Kylie Jenner.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  And say what I need to change in the the photo in a really funny way. And then then I have text and then it sends it to this voice cloning service. I trained it on, I think, half an hour of voice. So you give the system like half an hour of that person talking.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  And then it's able to produce any sentence in audio uh with with that person's voice. It's quite spectacular.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  Add a pop of color by holding some bright fashion accessories. It'll draw more eyes, babe.

• 34:58Speaker 03

  It's just me exploring a bit how those tools work. Uh, and it's quite fun. Also, the intonation is really good and um also the way she talks is it's in there. For example, she is using a lot vape. So sometimes she G P T reacts with like vape.

• 35:17Speaker 04

  Let's snap another one. You're gonna kill it.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  Next up, Dries says he's working on some kind of generative dating app. Knowing him, Lord only knows what that'll turn into, but beyond that, he's pretty coy. Do you think that the fundamentals here, the voice cloning tools, will lead to some bigger uh project?

• 35:39Speaker 03

  Uh, not. I don't have any good ideas at this moment with voice cloning. It's me again uh exploring a bit uh and this is something I put online.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  So you're waiting. You've got lots of bad ideas and you're waiting to combine them into some some good ideas with voice cloning.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  Dries's work is undeniably relevant right now, and it's showing. There are lots more A I themed exhibitions popping up. He's asked to give a lot more talks these days. His ideas are just generally around more. And I get it. I watch as each new A I service blows up the internet. And I fret about what it's gonna do to my work, my identity. And more than anything, I want someone who's not Sam Altman to tell me what to think about all these hairy questions. I probably shouldn't admit that as a tech reporter, but it's so true. Sadly for me, Dries is emphatically not here to clear anything up.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  As you do more talks and do more exhibitions, are lots of people coming to you and saying, what do you think? What? How should I feel about all this?

• 36:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, sometimes after a talk, there's like a small Q and A and that's one of the most asked questions. Because after a talk, I leave this open, like I I.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  Here are my projects. I explain them all. I do live experiments uh on stage. I make sure it's like entertaining and fun. But then they're like, "Hey, Dries, what's your message?" And I'm like, "Okay, there's really no message at all. I don't have any clue why I'm interested in this."

• 37:23Speaker 02

  I honestly can't tell if I buy that or not. It's possible that Dries is focused on finding unique raw material like webcam footage and dreaming up clever ways to look at it. All the inevitable questions around privacy and anonymity, he might have just stumbled into those. But I think there's a clue to be found in who he's choosing to watch. Celebrities, politicians, social media users, the pettiest possible scofflaws. That's just too interesting and provocative a spread of people. At least, that's where my brain goes. The AI tools he's playing with, they're powerful but agnostic on their

• 38:06Speaker 02

  own. They need a subject, or a target. And training them to keep politicians honest versus prosecute jaywalkers versus tail-famous people, each example changes my emotional response to the whole concept of AI, not just the one example of it. Which makes the body of his work greater than the sum of its parts. But again, that's just me. You're not gonna get anything like that from Dries. I hope he forgives me for this metaphor, but he's like a crow that leaves a weird shiny trinket at your doorstep. Is it a gift?

• 38:45Speaker 02

  A challenge? A threat? He just drops these funny and slightly upsetting tech mysteries at our feet. And the only note he ever leaves is, "Look what you can do." The rest is up to us.

• 39:08David Pierce?

  All right, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to Will and Dries for putting this whole story together, and thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on all of the AI stuff we've been talking about at theverge.com. Turns out, kind of a newsy week in the AI universe, like seemingly every week. So we'll put some links in the show notes, but as always, go read the website. We'll have some links to Dries's work, too, if you want to go check it out. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, or feelings, or AI art projects you'd like us to check out, or surveillance footage of me in Times Square you'd like me to see, you can always email us, [email protected], call the hotline, 866-VERGE11. We love hearing from you. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poor, and this episode is edited by Xander Adams.

• 39:51David Pierce?

  We'll be back on Tuesday and Friday with our regularly scheduled programming. Lots of fun stuff coming up this week. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 40:09Speaker 05

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