An Empire of Artificial Intelligence: Exploring an Intersection of Politics, Society, and Creativity

The ongoing creative upscaling of AI at the behest of OpenAI and the advent of ChatGPT are both remarkable and alarming. As things stand, this lesser-understood and unregulated field is riddled with futuristic speculations. And the techno-scientific nuances of AI cannot be imagined to function in silos, away from their sociopolitical implications. This article undertakes an overall critique of the philosophical underpinnings of AI—its sociopolitical and creative aspects. Methodologically, the article primarily locates the empire of AI phenomenon conceptually and consequently undertakes a theoretically-bound qualitative analysis of four key personal interviews of people engaged in the creative fields of art, writing, graphic design, and learning and development in India. The article conceptualizes an ‘empire of AI’ which substitutes a geo-centric notion of empire with a globalized, technologically armored, and all-pervasive empire. An ‘empire of AI’ encompasses the entire spectrum of lived reality and even influences social relations to create the world it inhabits. An ‘empire of AI’ unravels the politics of AI which gets more complex at an intersection of sociopolitical (related to the macro-effect of AI at a global scale) and creativity (linked to the micro-effect on individuals as the unit of analysis). This ‘empire of AI’ is a byproduct of a theoretical amalgamation of the AI Empire and neoliberal governmentality. The former discusses the deterritorialized structures of global oppression—digital colonialism, tech hegemony, and surveillance at the behest of the AI Empire. The latter focuses on how neoliberalism expands its invisible tentacles of governmental control through bio-power which seemingly engages in the production of subjects as “free” individuals and consumers of the market rationale.