Artificial Intelligence (AI) took over the world last year, providing us with new tools to play with, unleashing thousands of possibilities, but also opening up a Pandora's Box of fear, loathing and anxiety, and pushing governments to consider sets of laws and regulations.
This relatively new technology also poses questions for what regards copyright matters as scraping works off the Internet to train systems has led to class-action lawsuits by authors claiming their works were used without permission.
But there is one artist who doesn't seem to be too bothered about AI - Ai Weiwei. In a recent project for CIRCA.ART (until 31 March), the Chinese dissident artist has posed questions to AI, juxtaposing his own answers to the ones proposed by ChatGPT. The result of the project - "Ai vs AI" - can be browsed online or watched every night at 8.24pm (20:24) on public screens in several cities, including London, Seoul, and Berlin among the others.
There are two main inspirations behind the project - the Tiānwèn (or "Heavenly Questions", 172 questions for the gods written on the walls of a temple by poet Qu Yuan over 2,300 years ago) and Ai's 81-day imprisonment by the Chinese state in 2011 (the project actually started on 11th January and, concluding in March, will last for 81 days).
But one key point to understand the project is the power behind questioning, something that Ai Weiwei knows well from his own personal experiences at being interrogated by authorities.
Questions implicitly indicate freedom (you are allowed to ask whatever you want, just like children often posing questions that end up embarrassing grown-ups...), but also point at imagination and at a search for knowledge and truth, while reminding us of the format of Socratic dialogues.
The concept behind the project is very simple: as human beings we ask questions not just out of curiosity, but hoping to learn and understand, trying to find solutions and explanations to a problem. The very act of posing questions distinguishes us from AI - it is indeed through our questions that we reveal our humanity, our preoccupations and worries. Ai Weiwei argues that, being a mechanical system, AI doesn't have any life history, it is not able to live human experiences and strong feelings such as love, hate, envy, despair, frustration or depression, and, unlike human beings, AI is not prone to make mistakes and learn from them. For all these reasons, AI can't therefore provide sincere questions. In a nutshell, from the artist's point of view, questions are the key to our humanity because they are related to our personal stories.
Quite often in this project the questions posed to AI also seem directly linked with Ai Weiwei's life, as they look at the role of the artist as activist, tackling censorship, freedom, whistleblowing, discrimination and AI and the situation of migrants (no, AI can't suggest us any safe migration routes...), even though there are also more humorous dilemmas, such as "What are the benefits of farting?"
In some cases Ai and AI's answers are similar: to the question "Am I in quantum superposition?" Ai replies that he is not in the position to answer; AI explains that the question is not applicable to humans.
In some situations AI can't perform as it could: asked to provide a comprehensive list of all prisoners of conscience in the world, AI admits it is not able to complete the task as the situation is dynamic and constantly changing, so it doesn't even try coming up with some names. Users can actually interact with this project and also add their views by posting their own answers.
Yet it is worth remembering that, in this project, it is not the answer that counts, after all, as Ai Weiwei highlights, answers can be manufactured by "knowledge factories" such as schools, religious institutions and national myths.
We may actually push forward the concept of "question" proposed by Ai Weiwei and ponder about the contemporary version of the question - the prompt. In the age of Artificial Intelligence, we ask a system via a prompt to do something for us, from writing a boring and formal email to our boss, to come up with the most bizarre hyperreal and photographic image, maybe extraordinary, maybe silly, yet absolutely incredible. So, our questions - or prompts - unlock the potential of a system (which takes us back to the idea that maybe the prompt is what counts in AI and what should be protected and copyrighted in Artificial Intelligence matters...).
So, is Ai Weiwei really not scared about AI? Well, the only thing that seems to scare him is the potential of this technology to become extremely powerful (but we can still pull the plug on it, can't we?), ending up offering only one "right" answer to different questions and therefore recreating one supposedly "correct" ideology, a sort of dictatorial regime.
Therefore questioning emerges as a core responsibility of both artists and individuals, it is an exercise that allows us to continually probe and reconsider our world and put to the test the advancing technologies surrounding us. Final tip for those ones who work in the fashion industry or are studying fashion: see if you can employ Ai Weiwei's method as an inspiration to come up with clever questions tailored for the industry and answered by a human and by Artificial Intelligence that may inspire a collection, a press release or even an art and fashion project.
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