Artificial Intelligence (AI) arguably escaped human control long before predictions of human extinction became conflated with the theoretical concept of technological Singularity.

Typically, innovation — which involves experimentation, prototyping, testing, market development, and consumer rollout — predates policy, laws, and safeguards, and AI was no exception. My research as a PhD scholar focused on the ethical dimensions of AI, its inexorable ties to the surveillance of humanity, and the risks of unmitigated AI development as it pertained to wearable and human-implantable computational architecture.

The paradox — as I have questioned of myself — is this: as an artist generating creative works with AI, am I surrendering my creative soul to a machine, and will my creative practice ultimately be consumed or replaced by it?

Perhaps it is my responsibility as an artist to explore, experiment, discover, and articulate how AI (and the broader concept of Superintelligence) may be considered a transformational step in the development of the human hive mind — dispelling the notion that it has been engineered as a malevolent force rendering humankind obsolete. Despite my reservations, I find myself, twenty years on, compelled to explore topics such as humanity's existential crisis — including whether we are already inhabited by inter-celestial beings — using experimental generative models and tools that both differ from and complement my traditional creative practice.

In this creative context, I firmly believe that AI may be a contemporary manifestation of human intelligence and biological consciousness — a co-existence with the natural world as we each journey through time in an ever-expanding metaverse, where our universe is only a tiny part, and our individual and collective human existence is both magnificent and insignificant in equal measure.

This OBJKT minted Tezos NFT collection, contains single-edition artworks generated with AITubo Flux V1.0 text-to-image model with no set style, randomly selected LoRAs, using dynamic prompt changes as iterative responses to generative results