Holly Herndon
Composer & AI Artist
Composer with a Stanford PhD who has spent a decade making music with machine learning — from her AI “baby” Spawn to the Holly+ voice twin — while building Spawning, the consent layer for AI training data.
Why this score
How the formula works →- +2.5proBuilds AI professionally
- +1.5proUses AI in their work
- +1.5proHas published AI-made work
- +1.5proLicenses their data for AI training
- +0.5pro2 pro-AI statements (forceful)
Weights, statement counts, the ×1.5 multiplier because AI is their life’s work, and the formula’s smoothing are already baked in — the points add up to the score (direction-free evidence pulls toward the middle instead): Strongly Pro-AI · 7.5/10
In her words
What if we could create digital versions of ourselves and allowed other people to perform through us, and we could perform through other people with their permission?
Vocal deepfakes are here to stay. A balance needs to be found between protecting artists and encouraging people to experiment with a new and exciting technology.
Biography
Holly Herndon (born 1980 in Johnson City, Tennessee) is a Berlin-based composer who earned her doctorate at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Long before generative AI hit the mainstream, she was treating machine learning as an instrument: her 2019 album PROTO was built around Spawn, an AI “baby” trained — with consent — exclusively on the voices of Herndon and her ensemble.
Consent as an art form
In 2021 she launched Holly+, a “digital twin” that lets anyone sing through a machine-learned model of her voice, governed by a DAO that shares profits from approved uses. Announcing it, she argued that vocal deepfakes were inevitable and that the answer was structured experimentation rather than panic — an approach later echoed by Grimes’s Elf.Tech.
With partner Mat Dryhurst she then founded Spawning, a startup “building the consent layer for AI.” Its tool Have I Been Trained? lets artists discover whether their work sits in popular training datasets and register opt-outs, and its API lets AI companies honor those wishes — infrastructure that made Herndon one of the few figures respected on both sides of the training-data war.
Her art practice has kept pace: the Herndon-Dryhurst work xhairymutantx appeared in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, and their exhibition The Call, built from newly commissioned choral datasets, filled London’s Serpentine gallery the same year. Herndon’s consistent position is that AI will not kill music — but that artists must own the models, the data, and the terms.
Quote sources
- Rolling Stone, 2021(rollingstone.com)
- NPR, 2022(npr.org)
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/holly-herndon
