Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav Two artists from a Bay Area studio unveiled What Iceberg?, a table-sized installation placed at the public entrance to an OpenAI developer event in San Francisco on Tuesday. According to a description of the piece, the 5-foot-tall sculpture “shows OpenAI’s leaders and investors escaping a sinking ship with unimaginable wealth, while everyone else is left to face the cost of AI.” One of the co-creators of the piece, a man in his “late 30s” who gave his name as “Kevin,” said that he and members of the Berkeley-based Odd Friend Studio spent the last five days working to build What Iceberg? out of papier mâché, cardboard, paint—and a repurposed table. “I think most people focus on this concept of the iceberg,” Kevin told Ars. “The inevitable collision—I think it’s a very obvious metaphor. I think the real metaphor is that this AI world we’re living in is much like the Titanic. There was always a contingency plan for the rich and wealthy.
The rest of us? The workers of the lower decks? We are the ones that are going to suffer the consequences.” Kevin told Ars that while the piece cost relatively little in monetary value, it had a different kind of cost to make. The message is not subtle.
William Fitzgerald The message is not subtle. William Fitzgerald The artwork under construction. The artwork under construction. The message is not subtle.
William Fitzgerald The artwork under construction. “The cost here is time,” he said. “Doing everything by hand, creating the structure, taking as few shortcuts as possible, and doing this in a really quick time period is a lot of the real cost. In so many ways, that is the cost of art. Good art and intentional art—stuff that makes sense and craftsmanship—that’s a function of time. “Creativity is our birthright, and when someone sells you a shortcut to escape that—that’s insane to me. In some ways, it is the antithesis of a lot of bad algorithmically generated art.
Maybe people will tell us it’s bad art? Who cares! Making and creating is something that AI claims that it does, but it doesn’t.” OpenAI, as one of the world’s largest AI companies, has been the target of numerous other protests in recent months and years. Last week, for instance, people protested against OpenAI at its New York City offices.
On Monday, training for OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-6.1 Astra, was stopped over safety concerns. Also on Monday, the company apologized for accessing Australian government websites “in ways that we were not authorized to.” Meanwhile, the state of Florida asked a court to halt OpenAI’s development, calling it an “unacceptably risky product.” OpenAI did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment on Tuesday morning. 8 Comments
