‘Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, & the University: who would if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War. Painters! on you I call! Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fashionable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertizing boasts that they make of such work.’ (Milton, pl. 1, E95)

As the world is turned upside down by the rise of AI and machine learning, one way to consider the impact of these new technologies is in the light of a much longer history of tension between art and capitalism, one which greatly affected the work of William Blake through what Morris Eaves called the counter arts conspiracy.

Jason Whittaker is an academic and writer who as well as having written on Blake for several decades was also a tech journalist and has explored the impact of AI and digital media on culture and society, most recently in Tech Giants, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Journalism and You Want What We’ve Got: Big Tech v. Big Journalism.