In his words
AI, despite all the information it obtains from human experience, lacks the imagination and, most importantly, the human will.
This is not about freedom of speech. This is about freedom of questions.
If humans will ever be liberated, it will be because we ask the right questions, not provide the right answers.
Biography
Ai Weiwei (born 1957 in Beijing) is China’s most famous dissident artist — creator of the Bird’s Nest stadium design and the 100 million porcelain Sunflower Seeds, detained by Chinese authorities for 81 days in 2011, and since exiled to Europe. His work has always insisted that art is inseparable from politics and individual conscience, which is precisely the ground on which he confronts artificial intelligence.
Ai vs AI
From January to March 2024, his public commission Ai vs AI posed one question per night — 81 in all, one for each day of his detention — on the Piccadilly Lights screen in London at 20:24, with his own answers published alongside those of AI systems. Launching the work, he told The Guardian that art which can be easily replicated by AI is “meaningless,” and argued that machines, having no life story or personhood, cannot ask a sincere question at all.
The machine is always trying to perfect its outcome. As humans, we never really want just a perfect answer. We want to give meaning and to insert a personal interpretation into the answer.
His position carries nuance: Ai vs AI was the first time he used AI in his own art, and he frames the technology less as a rival than as a mirror that exposes how much art teaching and image-making was already rote. But his verdict is consistent — AI systems homogenize, perfect, and answer, while humanity lives in imperfection, privacy, and questioning. For an artist whose career was built defying an authoritarian state, a technology that centralizes answers is not neutral.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
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