Are You Stupid?

Next Wednesday, 1st July at 4pm, we’re bringing together thinkers and practitioners from across culture, technology and the internet to unpack a deceptively simple question that feels increasingly urgent in the age of AI: are you stupid?

As AI becomes embedded in everyday life, we’re exploring how it is reshaping the value of human judgement – and why taste, intuition and imperfection may matter more than ever, for both individuals and brands. 

Meet the panellists:

Mindy Seu is an artist and technologist based between Los Angeles and New York. Working across performance, publishing and research, her practice examines online cultures and the histories embedded within the internet itself. Most recently, she published A Sexual History Of The Internet, a landmark exploration of desire, identity and power online.

Clive Martin is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The New Statesman and The Fence across print, digital and documentary formats. He created the VICE series Big Night Out and is co-founder of Undergrowth, a research agency that combines journalistic instincts with cultural and consumer insight. He sees himself as broadly AI-sceptic, but sometimes uses ChatGPT.

Y7 is an interdisciplinary duo, Hannah Cobb and Declan Colquitt, based in Manchester, working across technological anthropology and creative R&D. Their work examines how emerging technologies and systems reshape social and cultural fields. They also write cultural criticism for publications and platforms including 032c and Flash Art, as well as running Conclave, a reading group and network connecting artists, theorists and technologists.

The conversation arrives at a moment when AI is rapidly redefining what intelligence looks like. Logic, efficiency and reason are increasingly treated as the ultimate markers of value. But intelligence has always been messier than that. In fact, intelligence may be one of the most over-indexed qualities of the modern era.

AI has moved from novelty to daily habit at dizzying speed. People turn to AI not just for information or efficiency, but for judgement. Somewhere along the way, thinking started to feel optional. As more cognitive labour becomes automated, human discernment is taking on new significance. When anyone can generate almost anything, the real value lies in deciding what is worth making in the first place. Even Greg Brockman, one of the architects behind ChatGPT, declared that “taste is a new core skill”.

For brands, the implications are important. In a world flooded with AI-generated content, polish becomes cheap. Personality, perspective and cultural fluency become increasingly difficult to replicate. The challenge is no longer producing more, faster. It’s producing something that feels like it was produced by a human.

AI is increasingly positioned in opposition to creativity, taste and originality, even as some of technology’s most powerful figures become obsessed with all three. Many concerns surrounding AI can be measured: environmental costs, intellectual property disputes, algorithmic bias, surveillance and warfare. Yet some of the most important questions resist quantification entirely.

Even if every practical concern were solved, deeper questions would remain. How does AI change our understanding of intelligence? What does it do to creativity, judgement, curiosity or doubt?

This FORUM explores those questions. Not to offer a definitive moral position on AI, but to examine how the technology is reshaping our relationship with intelligence itself. Ultimately, the question isn’t only whether AI is intelligent. It’s what happens when we start outsourcing thought itself.