'Great Grandmother Monkey'

The recent developments of artificial intelligence (AI) in the creative fields have sparked my curiosity and concern. As I have been involved in this domain for some time, I wanted to understand the implications of AI for society, myself, and the nature of creativity. The more I learned, the more I felt compelled to think about the consequences of AI for human life and values

One of the first things I noticed was the addictive power of AI. I have been a smoker for 20 years, but generating AI art made me forget about cigarettes for hours. I felt a stronger thrill by just tapping create on the screen than by smoking. It was the most addictive thing I have ever experienced. This suggests that AI has the potential to be accepted by humans, especially the younger ones, without much critical reflection. It could create a zombie-like situation.

Another thing that amazed me was the unlimited capacity of AI to produce variations and combinations. AI can learn and absorb tremendous amounts of information, millions of times faster than a human, and output results at mind-boggling speed. This raises the question: what is happening to the world?

It seems that the owners of big corporations have found an ideal worker in AI: one that is undemanding, infinitely productive, and efficient. AI can run the world for them, in almost every industry and sphere of life. Human effort in any field would become irrelevant. We have seen this phenomenon since the dawn of the modern age. Many cultures, languages, and local practices around the world have gone extinct or are in the process of disappearing, because they were not compatible with modern industrial society. They were not efficient enough. Or, to put it another way, humans are not serious enough to be an eternally grinding cog in the wheel. Humans are deviant, playful, emotionally unstable dreamers, in the most fundamental sense, owing to their evolutionary experience.

But the system does not want playful beings; it wants serious robots. Because seriousness promises constant productivity and profits. And let me just touch on the absurdity of this serious enterprise. A team of 200 serious workers trying to figure out how to make and sell a soap. For what? So a guy can impress his friends by buying a third mansion in Dubai? What a waste of the highest form of life in the universe. The history of the modern period seems like the history of the triumph of seriousness over playfulness. The triumph of robots over humans. Humans could not be as serious as the corporations wanted them to be, so they invented AI. An infinitely serious entity, disguised as the ultimate playful being. It makes 1000 paintings in a second.

To my friends who have been telling me not to worry about AI, because human ideas, effort, and skills would always remain valuable and relevant, I would just say: wait and see. I have seen AI visualise the deepest part of my dreams in a matter of seconds. I foresee that, ultimately, the ability to dream would vanish from humanity. And wait until it gets to your desires, your motivations, your feelings. Imagine AI software learning to replicate feelings and bombarding them in your nervous system. Would we ever feel real love again? Would we ever feel angry towards war, global exploitation of humans, animals, and destruction of ecosystems, world hunger, oppression, violence, when we can just plug in and feel artificially created complex feelings? I would just say: wait and see.

The very first act of playfulness and freedom by a human or a monkey was probably making lines and shapes on sand with their fingers 3 million years ago. And the very last heroic act of freedom would be a line drawn, or clay pressed into a form, or paint splashed somewhere, anywhere. I planned to channel this primal energy of freedom into a performative act and embody the process. I tried to express what our great grandmother monkey would have felt while moving her hands on the sand, which I did while holding a marker.

"Great grandmother monkey" , 2022, Performative drawing, Syed Sachal Rizvi