The Chronicle is an ongoing research initiative documenting how people are adapting to AI—through workshops, interviews, story analysis, and direct observation. Our first release offers an exploratory map of emerging psychological patterns.
At the Artificiality Institute, we want to know how to think better with AI. Over the past two and a half years, we've studied how over 1,000 people are adapting to this collision of intelligences. What we found challenges almost everything being said about AI and productivity.
People are forming psychological relationships with AI systems that feel unprecedented to them. The Chronicle maps the psychological changes happening as people incorporate AI into their thinking, creativity, and daily relationships.
Imagining the existential risk of AI using generative AI.
We enjoy using generative AI to experience its reflection of humanity. How does an AI imagine a concept based on what it has learned from its training on human history?
In this gallery, we explore how Midjourney imagines concepts from our essay on existential risk. What is the existential risk of AI? What is artificial general intelligence and AI super intelligence? Will AI save us?
The results show that when holding up a generative AI mirror to humanity, we find the existential risk of AI to be terrifying.
Our initial series imagines the existential risk of AI. Midjourney reflects our dystopian fears.
Our next series adds concepts to the existential risk of AI, including AI superintelligence, end of humanity, and robot dominance.
We wondered if Midjourney could imagine a positive future so we prompted it with the idea of AI and robots saving the world. No question, Midjourney imagines “AI saving the world” to be a much more positive than any of our other prompts. However, the final image isn’t imagining a world we consider “saved.”
Perhaps due to the influence of Pixar and others in Hollywood, Midjourney imagines that “robots saving the world” as cute anthropomorphized robots having tender moments with children.
Finally, we wondered whether Midjourney could help us answer the questions: Can AI save us? And, Can AI save humanity? While the first presents a possibly hopeful cyborg future, the second doesn’t give us much hope at all.
Writing and Conversations About AI (Not Written by AI)
