Personal message from Greg

On the 15th of November, 2023, the Museum of Artificial Intelligence opened its doors, or more accurately, its windows, at Skrapan, Medborgarplatsen, Stockholm.

For me this is a personal story, as I have been challenged by the recent onslaught of AI in every area of my creative endeavors – writing, art, music, the invention of things.

I am a creator. That's all I know how to do — attempting to bring into the world something beautiful, clever, aesthetic, funny. I'm not a business person. I stink at business. I'm not a worker. Give me a job and I will spend more time trying to think up a better, or crazier, way to do it than actually getting anything done.

No, I'm a creator, and a rather clumsy one at that. I'm a bumbler with more ego than talent. A dyslexic who needs a spell checker. An artist who uses photoshop because he can't draw the simplest of objects. A musician lost without autotune. My need for augmentation is endless.

Augmentation is a concept developed by the IT pioneer Douglas Engelbart. Augmentation was in Engelbart’s day all about using computers to support human intelligence and decision-making capabilities. Now as AI threatens, or promises — pick your verb of choice, to fly past us in intelligence, decision-making, creativity and who knows what? — the tables have turned. Now it is we who are expected to do the augmentation of AI. Or the control. Or perhaps, as some people maintain, pull its plug.

And all of us who earn our living as creators, or simply take joy in creating for its own sake, we will have to ask the question: What's the point? Where do I fit in? What happens next?

And all of us who have appreciated and profited from human creativity, human invention and the technologies evolved by human civilization through our centuries on this planet, will also have to ask: What's the point? Where do I fit in? What happens next? 

These questions are universal, and relevant for all of us, and along my journey into this new unpredictable and fascinating world I have been joined by like-minded individuals who are contributing ideas and labor into making this museum a worthwhile, meaningful entity. With great ambitions and meager resources we saw an opportunity to educate, enlighten and provoke and we took it.

This museum is about the promises and threats — the Good, Bad, and Ugly of AI. The real life instantiation of a SWOT diagram. Our ambition is to be multimodal and cover every field of endeavor that we can cram into our minimal space. Our ambition is to invite organizations and individuals to join us in discussion and debate. Our ambition is to organize workshops and theme-based events.

By the way, you are welcome to join in on our project, just drop us a line at [email protected]

Greg FitzPatrick