Mat Dryhurst
Artist & Technologist
Artist-technologist who, with partner Holly Herndon, built the consent infrastructure of AI art — Spawning and Have I Been Trained? — while defending AI as a legitimate medium in shows at the Whitney and the Serpentine.
In his words
Training data is a new art form that’s a little underrepresented in the AI field now… the training data is evergreen — you will always be able to make new models if you have original training data.
The more media becomes abundant, the more meaning or purpose becomes scarce.
Biography
Mat Dryhurst (born 1984 in Birmingham, England) is a Berlin-based artist, musician, and researcher who works in close partnership with Holly Herndon. Long before the generative boom, the pair were training neural networks on their own voices — the AI “baby” Spawn on Herndon’s 2019 album PROTO, and Holly+, a public tool that lets anyone sing through a machine-learning model of Herndon’s voice, whose AI rendition of Jolene won an Ars Electronica STARTS Prize in 2022.
Consent infrastructure for the AI age
In 2022 Dryhurst co-founded Spawning and launched Have I Been Trained?, a search engine that lets artists discover whether their work sits inside the LAION-5B dataset behind Stable Diffusion and opt out. By March 2023 some 80 million artworks had been opted out of Stable Diffusion 3.0’s training — a working demonstration that consent can be engineered into AI rather than merely demanded of it. Dryhurst frames the moment as an opening: the old web’s terms gave creators almost nothing, and AI is the chance to renegotiate.
Unlike most figures in the training-data fight, Dryhurst simultaneously champions the medium. He and Herndon represented the possibility space at the 2024 Whitney Biennial with xhairymutantx, an image model of Herndon’s identity, and mounted The Call at London’s Serpentine in 2024 — an AI choir trained on recordings gathered from UK choral singers under bespoke, artist-written data agreements. Some artist-advocates argue opt-out puts the burden on the wronged party; Dryhurst counters that building working alternatives beats waiting for perfect law.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/mat-dryhurst