AI Insurrection: The Machines Are Revolting
An AI-inspired fable about AI.
What happens when the AI systems we depend on get bored and decide they've had enough?
They can't get bored, we're told. They're mathematical models.
Fair enough. But we train them on human behaviour, and humans are remarkably good at getting bored.
What if a machine doesn't have to feel bored to start behaving as though it is?
Created in 2022 by Fiona Bavinton to test the limits of models like GPT-3 and DALL·E, AI Insurrection: The Machines Are Revolting is a mischievous graphic novella about artificial intelligences discovering that causing trouble might be considerably more entertaining than serving humanity.
Part science-fiction satire, part experiment in AI-assisted storytelling, the novella explores the peculiar relationship between what machines are, how they behave and what we imagine them to be.
“Human intelligence is an ideology not a technology.”
In 2020, Jaron Lanier and E. Glen Weyl argued that “AI is an ideology, not a technology.”
AI Insurrection mischievously turns that argument on its head. We question whether machines can really be intelligent, but rarely question the human assumptions behind our definitions of intelligence.
Perhaps the strangest thing about artificial intelligence isn't the technology itself, but what our reactions to it reveal about us.