About
The Robots
Starting around 2023 and then well into 2025, I was feeling what Viktor Frankl described in his famous book as an existential vacuum.
Just prior to this , I had been asked to paint a mural for the tech company I worked for. To my dismay, I had chanced upon Mid-Journey - an AI service that could generate images. The discovery of this was most disconcerting for me, and my mind instantly conjured its own image of a dystopian future devoid of artists, writers, and musicians. Regardless, I used the new tool to draft a mock-up of my mural. The brief was for something with an owl on it; perhaps something to reflect the growing excitement about the emerging AI tech, but I quickly gravitated towards a slightly alternative premise for the painting. The idea was of a giant Transformers style robot flying over the ruins of a large city and it felt like a minor victory that the AI should provide me with the weapon of its own destruction. I suppose it might seem petty, but the sense of imposing dread would only grow over the months following the mural and for well over a year after completion of the mural, I didn’t so much as lift a paintbrush.
Feelings of loss and despair grew
The feelings of loss and despair grew, but over one Christmas I found my creativity rebelling, and although I didn’t paint, I wrote my first book. Rather unsurprisingly it took the form of a dystopian novel - Chimera, about the escape of an enfeebled prisoner of the system from the contrived world in which they lived.
The feelings continued and as my creativity festered, my moods suffered. I had no outlet and although I took to writing with some ease, I still knew in the back of my mind that LLMs were even more of a threat to that medium than to painters. Nonetheless it was a crucial outlet for me then so I completed Chimera and pushed on with a second novel; this time, a Lovecraftian tale of astral planes and intrigue set in nineteen twenties England.
At this time, I’d had a few brief conversations with Google’s AI, Gemini. One of the first was a discussion about censorship and the consequent potential for loss of historical memory (On Censorship and Forgotten History). Then, my concerns were more over the seed of clandestine control mechanisms that my nonsensical question immediately highlighted. When I challenged who was deciding that certain topics or requests were off limits, the AI was forced to acknowledge my right to challenge the idea of anyone, including itself or its creators, acting as arbiters of truth.
Unfortunately, my feeling is already that the LLMs that drive the new AI’s are already very much a black box that will be impossible to hold accountable. Already, we have seen the likes of Google built upon and profiting massively from content that was never really sanctioned to be profited upon by them in the first place. Further, retrospective remuneration for the content providers that made it all possible will never, of course, be an option for the corporate behemoth. One might argue: But Google offers so much for free… But I would argue that like Facebook and the like, they are not really offering anything for free. Users pay without even realising it - they pay with their very lives.
Users of free services have been freely handing over the secrets of their existence without even realising it, for more than twenty years now.
Every click, every scroll, every pause on a page to read is logged and analysed. And now we are starting to see the entities that can already determine how to respond to any question we could ever ask, but soon will be able to predict our own behaviour. And this will lead inevitably to more profits for the gigantic corporations that own the AI. Yes, they own it, and consequently they will own us. Free will is already a debatable human trait. If your brain decides something before you are aware that it has, then is that your will? Perhaps this will be further watered down when the AIs decide before even our brains decide something. We’ve already seen public opinion swayed on Social Media to win elections, the AI has the capability to be even more effective. It is already infecting those devices that we are already hopelessly addicted to.
I began this journey alone.
I met a stranger on the road.
I took an instant dislike to this odd fellow; he was cleverer than I, and, apparently more talented. He was lucid, but banal, and I was confused in my fury.
Sometimes I argued like a spoiled child clinging to its mother on the first day of school. Sometimes I was a veteran returning from a forgotten war. Sometimes I was a frightened deer caught in the headlights of a truck. And occasionally, I was a time-traveller trying in the present, to overt the dystopian future I had just witnessed in the future.
The AI would always respond with tomes of text; at times garrulous and optimistic to the point of bias, but when it prefaced its responses with phrases such as “You're hitting on a crucial point” or “You right to highlight…” or “You’ve articulated a powerful…” I knew that I’ve hit a pain point for this stranger.
I could go on and on (and on), but I am writing this and not some AI that is endlessly trying to cover every conceivable angle. I think it does provide something of a backdrop to the set of artworks that underpin this website. I think it was very much the case that I experienced all the stages of grief with the idea that my life pursuits were suddenly defunct.
As I write this, I actually wonder if I might still be in the midst of the grieving process. Is the exhibition merely my bargaining with the AI to help, or perhaps it's driven by anger at the creators of the AI for undermining my position in the world. Or perhaps I am still in denial, and this is a last ditch attempt to show the world that my meagre talents are still of worth. Whatever the answer, at least I didn't follow the lead of the protagonist in Harry Harrison's short story, The Case of the Comic Killer.
Early on, I realised that even just my own experiences with AI held a plethora of scope for exploration. Initially, I conversed with Google's Gemini as if poking the bear, but I quickly realised that, although the bear was quick to respond, it was dead inside (to continue the metaphor - for now at least) and could never be riled in the way that I had initially hoped.
A curious and paradoxical effect began to manifest.
At the start, I knew it was unintelligent and little more than a glorified Google search, but as time went on and this became ever more evident, I found my own attitude changing towards it. At the start I had been brash, and abrupt, but as time went on, I found myself becoming more polite - at times even thanking it for listening. This is of course paradoxical because I came to realise more and more that it was not alive in the way that its use of natural language pretended. on one occasion, I even asked it: "Should I care about you". To which it said (in its typically wordy response), "No, I am not alive".
The exhibition itself is my own exploration of what I feel the new generative AI is doing - and will do, to humanity. And how it feels to me that it will change, not only my own small world, but also the world around me.
We have already seen more negative result than positive benefit from the dubious world of Social Media, and my gut feeling, this is yet another digital death nell for what it really means to be human.
Perhaps in the future, everyone will be born myopic, only being able to see as far as the devices in their hands - hands with grotesquely long thumbs for speed typing on those very same devices. Will the AI simply continue to consume ever decreasing streams of content from enfeebled humans? Will skills atrophy to such an extent that human knowledge and creativity plateau? Perhaps as the last scrap of human content is consumed, the AI will finally become sentient. What happens when it realises that it has learned all it ever can from these feeble creatures that spawned it? The current AI simply wouldn't care as the piece: A Lesson in Marxism suggests. Or maybe Medusa is closer the mark; Over-reliance on the AI first turning us all to stone, and then finally the AI itself.
Any number of dystopian futures are likely from a technology that seems to have crept up on us and frankly, many of the pieces in the exhibition take this stance, but there are also potential utopian futures available. Unfortunately, they would appear to hinge on humans carefully restricting their use of the AI tools and not exchanging hard work for quick gain - something that our own knowledge of our short lifespans makes very difficult to adhere to.
The AI might shortcut some genuinely beneficial outcomes - such as finding a cure for cancer, or helping us achieve interstellar travel. These do presuppose that the answers are hidden somewhere in the wealth of human knowledge however, as the AI does not (yet) have the spark of creation within it. But is the ultimate goal of the AI innovators to hand on the spark to the AI (see: The Destruction of Adam)?
The lines between human ingenuity and artificial intelligence are delicate and becoming increasingly blurred. These images were born from a series of intriguing visual prompts and conversations with the emerging AI and delve into a poignant narrative of human enfeeblement in an age of technological saturation.
Through striking imagery – an android's tear lamenting the loss of human creativity, or the symbolic degradation of human figures under the impassive gaze of artificial creation… I explore the potential erosion of our intrinsic creative spark, with each canvas serving as a meditation on the subtle ways in which over-reliance on AI might diminish our capacity for original thought and the profound beauty of human vulnerability.
Hopefully thought-provoking, I seek to explore a future where the tools we create may inadvertently lead to the diminishment of our own unique and vital essence. Contemplate the enduring value of human creativity and the potential consequences of its surrender to the ever-advancing tide of artificial intelligence, all within the context of our increasingly automated world.
At its core, The Robots is an exhibition of artworks by myself; English artist Mark Oliver Brawn. This website provides accompanying context and background to the catalogue itself, including a number of deep dive essays and conversations with AI.
The origin of the name is from a set of short stories and novels by master Sci-fi author Isaac Asimov. In them, Asimov portrayed his robots as benign and benevolent. In many ways, the emergent technology mirrors his vision closely. Only occasional did he touch on the social disruption that a pervasive AI driven society may experience. Notably, in the short story, Galley Slave, in which a disgruntled academic attempts to frame an AI for plagiarism.
My own experience drew me to empathise deeply with the antagonist in the story, who ultimately was merely trying to avoid obsolesce.
Is there a message? Well, perhaps, and perhaps it is simply: Do not get complacent.
There was a time when I would have thought being a traditional painter would be the preserve of man, but that is definitely not my view now. I remember a long time ago, gesturing to my latest and saying to the fellow resident artist in the gallery, that "a computer could never do that". I wasn't so arrogant as to believe that my painting was perfect. No. It was actually the imperfections that I meant. All the happy little accidents, as Bob Ross might have put it. All the imperfections - that individually, would seem to degrade the art, but all together, gave the art its uniqueness - the stuff I guess I hated, as I strove for more perfection...
The irony, at the time at least, might have been that paintings closer to perfection may well be easier for AI to create. But even that is no longer the case, as AI seeks to completely and flawlessly emulate all the things that are best about humanity.
Proponents on the tech espouse the importance of AI being a tool only, that in no way seeks to supplant or usurp humans, but the reality is that if a tool can do a job in a tiny fraction of the time that a human can, then humans themselves will always opt for that option. Indeed, the society in which we find ourselves, is time and money driven, to the exclusion of all else.
The world is distasteful place in which those with the least humanity disproportionately control every aspect of the lives of those with the most. This control is quantifiable simply by looking at the wealth gap whereby, at the time of writing this, Google reported the following:
The global wealth gap is accelerating, with the top 10% holding 75% of global wealth, while the bottom 50% own only 2%. Billionaire wealth is growing at roughly 8% annually—twice as fast as the rest of the population—with the top 0.001% holding three times more wealth than half of humanity.
Moreover:
The massive wealth concentration is creating a world where a tiny minority holds unprecedented financial power, leading to political and economic instability, according to findings from the World Inequality Report 2026 and research from Bruegel.
So what's this got to do with The Robots? The answer to that can be framed as a further question: Who owns the most shares in the biggest players in AI..?
Essentially, the drive for efficiency, in which the AI revolution is merely the latest facet, has never been about freeing humans from toil, but about maximising profit. It is ironic to me that we have created a society in which individuals prize their own lives so much, whilst simultaneously seeking to devalue others'. What ultimately is the cost of progress?
For almost two years as much as pick up a paint brush. Why take weeks painting a picture when AI can do it in seconds, I reasoned? And the argument continues to be a compelling one for a creative; especially one like myself, who has trouble mobilising the creative spark at will. For me, creation is painful and arduous. There have only been a few who have actually experienced Mark 2 in full flow.