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Drawing on a lifelong fascination with science and creativity, Sasha Stiles sees both poetry and technology as powerful tools for exploring feelings that can’t always be expressed. In this episode, Sasha shares her thoughts on using small texts to evoke big ideas, how technology helps us understand ourselves, and the evolving role of social media in reshaping how we connect through words.
When a poem becomes an NFT, something changes - not about the poem, but about the relationship between writer and reader, between text and ownership. Sasha Stiles has been thinking about this more carefully than almost anyone: as a poet, as a researcher at the AI X Lab, and as a collaborator with an AI entity she trained on her own writing. The small text turns out to be carrying a very large question.
Sasha Stiles is a poet and artist working at the intersection of language, technology, and blockchain. She is a researcher at the AI X Lab and collaborates with Bina48, an AI trained on her own writing and creative practice. Her work has established her as a leading voice in literary NFTs and in the broader conversation about what AI collaboration means for creative authorship. She approaches those questions not theoretically but through her writing practice itself - producing work that embodies the tensions it explores.
The literary NFT movement is still defining itself - figuring out what makes a text worth collecting, what blockchain provenance adds to the experience of a poem, and how the encounter between AI and language produces new kinds of creative possibility. Sasha Stiles is at the centre of all three of those questions. This conversation explores what she has learned from working with an AI trained on her own writing, what it changes about her sense of authorship, and why the small, specific gesture of the poem is exactly the right scale at which to test these large questions.
Bina48 and collaborative authorship
Training an AI on your own creative work and then collaborating with it is not the same as using a general-purpose AI tool. Stiles's practice with Bina48 produces a specific kind of encounter: with her own patterns, her own tendencies, her own blind spots - made strange by the act of reflection.
Literary NFTs and provenance
What blockchain adds to a poem is not primarily financial - it's relational and historical. Knowing who has owned a text, and in what order, adds a layer of meaning that print publication never provided. Stiles has been exploring what that means for the reading experience.
AI X Lab and language research
The research dimension of Stiles's practice grounds her artistic claims in serious inquiry. Her position at the AI X Lab gives her access to technical knowledge about language models that sharpens her creative questions considerably.
The small text as test case
The poem is small enough to hold in one hand and large enough to carry everything. Stiles uses the poem as a test case for big questions precisely because its compression makes the stakes visible.
If you're building a digital collection and haven't yet thought seriously about text-based work, this episode is the invitation. Sasha Stiles makes the case for why language belongs in digital collections - and what collecting a poem actually means when that poem exists on-chain. Her thinking about authorship and AI is directly relevant to any collector engaging with AI-generated or AI-assisted work.
Unlocked is the podcast by 100 collectors - the global network for digital art collectors. Each episode, we speak with artists, curators, collectors, and builders shaping the digital art world. No market speculation. No hype. Just honest, substantive conversations about art, practice, and what it means to collect today. New episodes release throughout the year. Find Unlocked on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 100 collectors is a membership network. [Explore membership →]
