We’re surrounded by huge amounts of discourse on human versus artificial intelligence – on how brands and individuals can use AI to amplify creativity rather than replace it. From Pope Leo’s ecclesiastical essay to A24’s recent collaboration with Google DeepMind, the conversation keeps circling the same axis: intelligence, optimisation, enhancement.
But at Protein, we’ve been looking the other way. Not toward smarter systems, but toward what AI reveals about our own stupidity – and whether that word might deserve a second look. In an age obsessed with information, what happens to the value of not knowing? Of having fewer answers, and better questions? As John Waters once put it, “Sometimes, stupid and cute are enough.”
That tension opens up harder questions than the industry usually likes to ask. How might AI actually erode our intelligence and creativity as much as it promises to extend them? What even counts as intelligence – can it be measured, standardised, tested – or is it something more slippery and human? And finally: could certain kinds of “stupidity” actually be useful?
Y7, an interdisciplinary duo, Hannah Cobb and Declan Colquitt, working across technological anthropology:
We’re really interested in how generative AI resembles itself rather than resembling something a human would make. We’re interested in the nascent aesthetic qualities of the technology, rather than the metric of AI being “good” only when it convincingly mimics hyperreal human-made output.
Mindy Seu, artist, technologist and author:
This intelligence question is interesting, because I think we have to question the various contexts that these tools are living in. So I think we see a lot of existentialism around AI in the West, because we’ve been seeing a lot of examples of these tools used for creative expression. In other countries, when we see AI technology dealing more with infrastructure, then it can feel like a tactical tool that’s accelerating something very mathematical and easy to apply. I think because I’m a professor at UCLA, I see a lot of students having anxiety around these tools. And we have to question why students are being compelled to use GPTs in the first place. There is an ease of access, of course, but it’s also about the social context we’re in – especially an academic one – where students are incentivised to excel by a very specific metric: the grade.
If they’re trying to get a good grade at all costs, and have low bandwidth or limited access to other resources, then of course they’re going to use GPTs to do things quickly and meet those requirements. So we have to look at the social structures that are encouraging speed and efficiency, and consider how we might instead encourage friction, failure and criticality.
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