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I was recently interviewed by Kanoko Tamura for the Japanese art magazine art journal “Bijutsu-Techo”. The interview will be published, in Japanese, in a forthcoming issue of the magazine, dedicated to Generative AI. I’m publishing an English-language transcript, only lightly edited, of our discussion, because it touches on so many things I’m interested in, and raises one particularly interesting question, which I attempted to answer: “what is a non-human aesthetic?”.

Kanoko Tamura:

For the next issue that we are working on, it’s going to be about generative AI and art. Becaus now ChatGPT and all these technologies have been spread among general people, a lot of people have started using those technologies. But it’s also a very particular time in the history because generative art has its own long history. But what is happening now is something very unique. So I want to use this issue as an opportunity to analyze what is really our current situation?

I think a lot of us are having been learning pros and cons of AI and if it’s actually useful for art. And there’s a huge discussion in the art world as well if we should use AI or not, and how should we face the AI from the point of view of the art world. So we are doing different interviews with artists to hear how people think about it and also in a way to try to find a positive way to look at the current situation. So being positive – not accepting everything nor denying everything, but trying to find a positive/productive way of looking at the technology from the artist’s point of view.

I will be interviewing you today, and I wish to talk about stuff based on Ways of Being where you talk about non-human intelligence and how you find values and possibilities in it? Also connecting that to what’s going on in the art world. If you, as an artist, see any possibilities or issues or challenges in usage of AI in terms of creative work. If you could start by maybe talking about how you see this current situation at the moment and also if you see any possibilities toward the future?

James Bridle:

Certainly, and thanks. It’s a vast thing to talk about, right? Because one thing to start talking about from the outside is really: what are we talking about? One of the first splits to talk about is between the AI that most people imagine and the AI that actually somewhat exists. We have AI as in the kind of vast science fiction imagining of everyone, which is fed by science fiction films, and by the marketing propaganda of companies that engage in this. That is something that’s so huge and so culturally powerful that it really shapes so much of our thinking about AI, in the art world, but also everywhere.

The reality of the actual tools that we have in the present moment are pretty different from what immediately pops into our head when we think about AI. So that’s the first thing: making a distinction between AI as it is in the popular imagination, and in the artistic imagination; and in the actuality of the tools that we have.

The second thing I would say is that there’s a really important distinction between the AI you’re talking about – generative AI and large language models – and all the different kinds of AI there actually are in existence. Because I have made projects over the years using neural networks, which underlie generative AI and large language models, but I haven’t used those specific technologies in my work. And these emerge from a whole history of other attempts to build AI that have different outcomes. The idea that AI is just something that can make images or make text out of these kind of huge corpora is only one thing that might be possible with them. There’s a range of practices around AI.

The other split I’m quite keen to make, that cuts across those other ones and doesn’t just apply to imagining other forms of AI, but trues to ask what we’re talking about when we talk about intelligence in general. Where does AI sit within our imagination of who gets to think, who gets to create. A lot of my work, and particularly in Ways of Being, has been about trying to figure out what we mean when we talk about AI – or rather, let’s call it machine intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. Because when we talk about intelligence, we mostly, subconsciously or consciously, mean what humans do. So all of our thinking about AI is contained within this very narrow idea that AI is somehow mimicking some or all aspects of what we consider to be human intelligence. It’s like a subset of human intelligence. One of my questions is: what if it’s not? What if it’s actually a radically different kind of thinking about the world? Therefore, what other modes of thinking the world might we be able to come up with to compare it to, to make sense of it, to measure it against?

I’ve always found it incredibly striking that AI, this big amorphous conceptual thing, is having such a huge moment in the popular imagination just as in a lot of other ways, in the art world and elsewhere in politics, in our relationship to the planet, we’re also rethinking the centrality of the human. We’re recognizing both our overwhelming power to organize, control, change, damage, perhaps improve the planet, but also our intense limitations, and part of that is recognizing that there’s a whole world of other beings that have always inhabited this planet, who also have their own forms of intelligence that are not lesser than ours. They’re just different ways of thinking the world. And so is machine intelligence like human intelligence? Is it like the intelligence of some other living being? Is it something entirely new? How does it partake in the world?

That brings up really fascinating philosophical questions concerning what we can know about the intelligence of others. Not just the intelligence of other species, but the intelligence of other people, the intelligence of people who’ve existed within different cultures, different cosmologies. There’s so many different ways of thinking in the world. That’s the beginning.

We can say some things about what kind of intelligence we are dealing with. One thing we can say about the contemporary forms of AI that most of us have access to is that it is what I call corporate AI. It is AI that is made by large corporations, mostly American and some Chinese and others, all within these very particular structures of power and capitalism. That is like a plant growing within a particular ecosystem. It will take on the qualities of the life it has to survive, what it considers success from that niche in which it grows up. This is why so much attention is paid to AIs that play games. It’s because that’s the only way we have to tell if it’s winning. But that makes it think that winning is the most important thing, which is a particular value of capitalism and of some other systems. It comes freighted with these kind of values, biases, concerns. It comes with its own view of the world that it acts upon.

Personally, I’m not interested in art involving AI that doesn’t contain some of that critique, that doesn’t contain some of that thinking. Because what is this thing we’re talking about? Is it a way of painting or is it a way of thinking about painting? Or is it a way of seeing the whole world? Is it a tool? Is it a context? Is it a framework? Or is it a whole cosmology, a whole model of the world that we’re interacting with?

And very, very finally and briefly, I want to make a case that AI is very boring. It’s not as interesting or as important as so many other things, including art. It has to be secondary to the important things we’re discussing, which in this case might be: what is art? What can art be? What can art do? We have to talk about the art first and then see if maybe, just perhaps, AI is an interesting component of that.

Does it help us answer some of these questions? Does it help us do something or not?

Kanoko Tamura:

Thank you for that. With that said, I’m interested in hearing about your AI Chair Project because I see a lot of potentials in that project. Even though it’s a very simple and maybe small project that you recently started on, I think that it shows or it tries to explore possibilities of humans and the other. How can we collaborate with someone who is not human? It also shows that the values that you reach together in the conversation with AI. It’s not always the standard beauty or function. It questions the values that humans think are good. I also think about the use of the used materials or the materials that are often usually considered useless. So I think AI Chair Project asks very crucial and fundamental question, and that’s how I interpreted the project. If you could maybe talk about your intention behind it or what did you get out of it after you started the project?

James Bridle:

So one of the ways that I think about AI is thinking about the fact that you are in communication with another being, a system or whatever it is that has a way of thinking the world that is different with the way that I have of thinking the world. And most of the discourse in AI is around the discordances that it creates. Things like AI hallucinations, the way it does seem to understand the world differently in a way that doesn’t make sense to humans, that comes across as a mistake or even sometimes as a lie. That’s often how these systems are critiqued as seen as being wrong, as being lying, when really that’s just how they understand the world, and it’s different to how humans understand the world.

In particular, they’re good at things that humans are bad at, like thinking about huge numbers or very large amounts of information. We’re just not very good at that. We need machines to help us with that or that’s what machines are good for, anyway. But then they’re not good at things that humans are good at, like certain other types of creative thinking, guessing, hunches, another kind of thinking in the world, just a different way of thinking. So we have these different ways of thinking. There’s different roles to be had here, and in particular rather than assuming that AI is something that will outcompete humans, we can at least start to think about it as being something that accompanies humans, that collaborates with humans, that we can put those ways of thinking into some kind of productive alignment.

One thing that the computer systems are really good at that humans aren’t so good at is optimization and efficiency. One of the long term uses for computer systems within architecture, for example, is something like how do we make a bridge with fewer supports, or less material? How do we build a more efficient roof on a house? These kind of questions. Complex mathematical problems. So that seemed like the thing to push on. I had a load of spare wood sitting around, scrap wood from other projects. So I was like, okay, well, I know how to build a chair, and chairs are useful, direct, you know. We’re probably not going to improve on the design of the chair: humans know how to make the best form of the chair for the human body. It’s just something that holds you off the ground. But I thought that the AI could perhaps do this kind of creative work that I wasn’t so good at, which was to imagine which materials would be the most efficient in different places. That’s what I was really hoping for from the project, that I would be able to give this machine a bunch of descriptions of pieces of wood that I actually had, and it would tell me how to combine them in ways that I wouldn’t have thought of, that wouldn’t have occurred to me.

The result was actually less interesting than that. It told me how to build a very simple chair. It did use the materials very efficiently. There was also work for me to do, to figure out how to follow its instructions. I had to do some creative work here. That was interesting to me because the AI didn’t learn anything from this experience, but I learned something practical and definite from this experience. My carpentry improved slightly. That’s more than collaboration. That’s commensalism, which is a term for a symbiotic relationship where something gets better on both sides. You’re not just surviving. You’re actually improving. I think that’s really key, in that I want to have relationships with my tools that is commensurate. Where we’re improved by our use of them rather than merely doing as we’re told or using them instead of our brains. It’s trying to find the places in which we have either hierarchical relationships or negative parasitic relationships, which most of our relationships with technology are, and replace them with commensal ones. Where we are all uplifted by this experience.

There’s a bunch of other stuff in there about like treating the AI as the other and that kind of stuff. But that was really my main thing: how do I build something greater out of this? Also, how do I get a better understanding of the thing that I’m dealing with? Because buried in there is a very literal description of how this kind of AI functions. The chairs that I’ve built by asking the AI to help me build chairs are the sort of chairs that are imagined by someone who has only ever read about chairs. They’ve never sat in one, which is a very important thing to understand about how AI understands things. It’s such a beautifully direct description of what this thing is that I’m dealing with that becomes so apparent when you actually make a thing.

That’s slightly in counterpoint to my last point about how you have to talk about the art first. Sometimes you just have to do the thing and then figure out what the art of it is.

Kanoko Tamura:

Yes. It’s very interesting the last thing you talked about. By making the chair, you kind of understand what exactly AI is, because it produces something not from the experience of sitting, and but out of all the information. I think in Ways of Being, you also talk about there are lots of hints as to how humans can build relationship with non-humans, including AI and other animals in nature. I think you could imagine that relationship being the kind of relationship that you’re building with AI as well. Do you have any specific ideas or examples or imagination on how exactly we can build that kind of relationship with non-humans? I’m interested in animals and plants and all the other beings that you talked about in the book as well. Maybe you could focus on those instead of AI.

James Bridle:

Happily. Very happily. What to say? One of the main points of Ways of Being is that everything is alive. Everything has its own being. Everything exists in this world equally with everything else, with its own presence, its own awareness, its own living force, whatever that is. Some of that is knowable and recognizable by us. Some of it is so strange and different to us that it’s almost impossible for us to grasp. How do we change or shape our awareness in recognition of that? How do we enter into a world in which most of the life that’s occurring is radically different to us and yet shares the world with us? There’s many possible answers to that. One of them is to directly experience, to pay attention. As I said about the AI chair, sometimes you have to do it. Most of what I’m talking about exists in the realm of direct experience. It can’t be spoken of.

What do I mean when I say these things cannot be spoken of? Well, what I mean is that language is a system for making distinctions between things. So you have to divide things up in order to be able to talk about them meaningfully. If I say “this mountain”, I’m describing a particular mountain. I’m separating it from other things. But if I say the mountain is alive, what does that mean? Does it mean that the mountain breathes like a mammal? Does it exist like a bacteria? Does it live like the wind lives? The words stop having meanings in ways that are useful to us. But the mountain is alive. It’s just really hard to talk about. So the only really meaningful relationship one can have is one that goes beyond language. That concerns direct experience. Things just happen: that is the realm of direct experience. And that’s also the realm of quite a lot of art. So we’re talking about things that have a relationship. That go beyond everyday language and quite often beyond language itself in order to be able to conceive, feel and experience things that are truer than what we can put into any form of words.

The question then becomes what kind of relationships do we want to have. What do we want these to be for? Do we want these to be relationships to build a better world? A world of mutual flourishing, a world in which everyone gets to live to their fullest possibilities? And by everyone, I do also mean the birds, the animals, the seas, the mountains. How do we build a world of mutual flourishing? It comes from these kinds of forms of attention, from caring about these things, and by the gift of thinking the world as being fully alive.

A lesser question, but one that I am still fascinated with is: do computers count? Does AI count? Is AI alive? Could it be? Which is this question that keeps coming up. I find it fascinating. This is, for me, the best use of AI because it makes me ask this question – Is AI alive, in the terms that I’m talking about? If so, how? Because I understand that aliveness has some kind of a resonance, but also something that descends from something greater, from the universe. Everything comes out of the universe. That’s what makes it alive. Does AI come out of that? Or did we build it in just in the lab, and therefore, it has no life? But everything is alive. I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.

What is AI made out of? It’s literally made out of the bodies of creatures that died billions of years ago. It’s made out of plastic and oil and electrons. So it is part of the universe as much as anything else. What does it mean to think and have these relationships? How does it change us to have these relationships? How is the world changed by the relationships that we have? These are the questions that I’m interested in.

Kanoko Tamura:

I think that’s a very, very important message and question that you raised that is important not only to this topic that we want to discuss in the magazine issue, but it’s a very fundamental question that we all need to face because when we try to ask questions about AI, we tend to start by questioning and trying to criticize the corporate AI. If it’s useful or not or if it’s helpful or not. But I think if you really think about why AI is here and is AI alive, we can actually get to a very fundamental question in art as well because instead of talking about all the games happening in the art market, we start to ask questions like why do we start drawing in first place, or why do we start dancing and singing? I think it connects to those more important questions.

James Bridle:

Yes, absolutely. That for me is the most interesting thing about AI. It’s the idea of it, not whatever we write in code or systems. Why as a species are we so fascinated by the idea of there being non-human intelligence?

I should really qualify that by saying why as particular human cultures are we fascinated by non-human intelligence? Because for many cultures, the idea of non-human intelligence is not so complicated. For someone acculturated to, in particular, a Western European post-enlightenment scientific position, we’ve been told that there’s no such thing. And we’ve forced most of the world, if not to accept that position, then at least to live within it. We are living within the consequences of that imperial, colonial, epistemological action. Whatever anyone else in the world thinks, we’ve set the world up to run as though there’s nothing but the human and really nothing but certain types of human that matter. So the project, the only important project at the present, is to change that situation.

I think that’s quite a long shot, given how entrenched our colonialist, capitalist, and Western Enlightenment scientific cultures are. But it does seem to me that the attention given to AI quite clearly speaks to a yearning within the human to meet and learn from the non-human.

Kanoko Tamura:

With that said or from that point of view, do you think it’s possible to kind of come back to the art and talk about aesthetics with non-human intelligence? Because aesthetics is important, it’s being discussed over years by philosophers, and then there is also a discussion of new aesthetics. But do you think it’s possible to discuss non-human aesthetics, or aesthetics of intelligence, or aesthetics of being?

James Bridle:

My engagement with aesthetics has always been somewhat accidental. My project, The New Aesthetic, which still continues, is very much a sort of amateur, outsider one, in which I responded quite viscerally to things that I was encountering. It’s always been a research project rather than a doing project in that sense. But in another sense, it’s something I’ve been doing for almost 20 years now. So I guess I can call it meaningful.

The first thing to say about a non-human aesthetic would be that it can’t be an aesthetic, as we understand it, because aesthetics is about human sense and human judgment and experience. It’s about that we encounter, process, think of the world primarily in terms of appearances because we’ve got these great big eyes in the front of our head that are our primary sense. But that’s not how most of the universe encounters itself.

One of the things I always think about is the way, as humans, we live within such a narrow band of space time, in multiple ways. Within time, we live within the ticking of a clock. Our day-to-day time, the 24-hour cycle, and the cycle of our attention, which is also determined by things outside of us. We also live within the time scale of our lives, and we live within the time scale of our culture, what our culture remembers, which is a very small fraction of the history of the planet, let alone the universe, let alone, a number of other things. We live within this really narrow time and we can’t see that far ahead. Our experience is so bounded just by time. And then regarding space, we can see a little, we can hear a little, but that is limited by the frequencies we can perceive. There are huge numbers of beings that live on this planet that can hear things that we can’t hear. So even there, immediately, this other aesthetic, a non-human aesthetic, is bigger, broader, deeper, wider, stranger than a human aesthetic because it extends into all these different potential realizations, awarenesses, and therefore, things to process and therefore, things to think with. It increases the number of objects to think with.

So I guess that actually makes for me quite a neat definition of a non-human aesthetic: to increase the number of things we have to think with. Every culture has its own set of aesthetics that it thinks with and humans have collectively a set things to think with. The most interesting thing for me in the world is trying to expand the things, or rather beings, that we have to think with. I add that ‘beings’ to it because I think a big part of this is the transformation of things into beings. The process by which we stop regarding only the people that we know, or humans in general as being people, beings who matter, and we start to see everything as being people who are in their own process of passing through space time on a trajectory that occasionally intersects with our own. Because the moment of thinking happens when those things collide. The moment of living happens when those things collide.

In Ways of Being, I write about intelligence as being a cooperative process. But I’d go a lot further than that, and I would say this kind of living and thinking, this being or mattering is what happens when beings interact, when they meet. How do we increase the number of relationships? That is not a non-human, but a more-than-human aesthetics, that includes all these possible and effectively infinite different intersections between beings to produce entirely new perspectives, new ways of perceiving and thinking the world.

Kanoko Tamura:

You gave us a lot of hints to really digest and think on, so thank you for that. Do you have any plans for near future or anything that you’re working on at the moment that you could tell us? Any current project that you’re interested in?

James Bridle:

My work at present is largely focused on quite practical work. I spent, you know, a lot of the last 10, 15 years looking at questions of technology. That’s been my main focus. Writing Ways of Being was was part of, I should say, a conscious transition from a technological focus to an ecological focus. It’s explicit in the book, but it’s part of my whole practice and part of my whole life. I think for me and for a lot of other people, the most urgent work at present is to address the planetary ecological crisis. And an incredibly important question for artists is: what is our role within that?

One of the ways that I think about that is to ask questions of art itself, of what it can do, of how it operates. In my work with technology, I found myself running up a lot against essentially a problem of representation, which is where you make work with technology about technology that just does more technology in various ways that just recreates the same systems you’re critiquing. That problem is even greater when it comes to ecological work. It’s very easy to make work about climate change. It’s also pointless and irresponsible in the present moment.

The only work that really matters is work that actually does something. I’m not about to claim that my work succeeds in doing that. It’s hard. But it is my intention always that the work actually does some work. Now that can be work to inform people just to talk about things, to raise these as issues, to increase awareness or imagination, but that is mostly representation. It can also be super practical. I build solar panels. I build windmills. I make these things as works of art that actually do the thing, that actually work. I call them ‘works that work’ or ‘works that do work’ because they’re actively part of the transformation that I’d like to see in the world. They’re not solutions; I don’t believe in solutions. But I do believe in a kind of active engagement that the work, the artworks themselves, are part of. They don’t stand alone. They’re not representations of anything anymore. They’re actually getting involved in some way. That’s probably of a piece with my feelings about ecology, about the world around me, about the aliveness of everything. The artworks partake as much as anything else. That’s where I’m at these days. I’m making things and I’m making things in the world and I’m eager to see what the world thinks about it.