In one of many opening pictures of Un Chien Andalou, a 1929 French movie co-written by Salvador Dalí, usually cited as one of many first surrealist movies, a younger girl stares immediately on the digicam as a razor blade slices throughout her eye.
OK, she did not even have her eye slit open, because of film magic and all. However the film makes use of surrealism as a robust new manner of seeing and decoding the world. It is purported to shock us out of passive viewing and spectatorship, and take us past conventional notion.
Final Thursday, as I sat in a lecture corridor on the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, listening to a speak about rising expertise and innovation in 2026, I hoped for a dialogue about equally revolutionary trendy improvements.
However far too usually, once we speak about AI, we do not confront this doubtlessly revolutionary expertise with our eyes large open. As an alternative, whether or not it is in small lectures, social media posts or Tremendous Bowl commercials, we get a one-sided advertising and marketing pitch that masks the actual dangers and issues surrounding AI.
Primarily based on the viewers’s questions through the Q&A, this was seemingly the primary actual introduction to generative and physical AI for a lot of of them. The group absorbed the whole lot uncritically, nodding alongside and blooming with pleasure because the lecture painted an image of a future remodeled totally for the higher.
In a single notably grating occasion, we have been proven a video of LG’s laundry-folding robot that debuted final month on the CES 2026 commerce present in Las Vegas. Having seen the robotic for myself, I knew how gradual it was at folding only one uniform-sized T-shirt. A robotic that may really help with residence chores is years away.
“Who desires this robotic?” the speaker shouted, and fingers raised all around the room.
Was there any point out of the expertise’s limitations, like the truth that it wants human assist to succeed in into the hamper? Was there any point out of the prohibitive price? After all not. The gang left that room with their understanding of AI formed by somebody who had rigorously averted mentioning any of the expertise’s downsides.
This can be a drawback.
The individuals with platforms — whether or not they’re tech specialists, museum lecturers or influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers — have a duty to inform the reality about AI. Not simply the thrilling components. Not simply the components that make for good advertising and marketing. All of it.
When public figures spotlight AI’s capabilities, they gloss over its dangers: the devastating environmental impact, the proclivity for chatbots to hallucinate and make things up, the regarding manner AI use impacts memory skills and the rising incidents of AI-induced psychosis and suicide.
These risks are conveniently neglected of the dialog; conversations that form public notion in a manner that serves a choose few’s pursuits, not the world’s.
We have seen this harmful sample earlier than.
Since a 2018 US Supreme Courtroom choice allowed states to legalize sports activities betting, celebrities and influencers have lined as much as promote betting apps, pocketing large checks whereas their followers face rising charges of playing dependancy and monetary break.
The 2021 crypto growth additionally introduced a parade of celebrities hawking digital cash, lots of which later crashed, leaving common individuals holding nugatory property. Kim Kardashian settled with the SEC for $1.26 million in penalties for selling a crypto token with out disclosing that she was paid to take action. Matt Damon advised us “fortune favors the courageous” in a February 2022 Crypto.com Tremendous Bowl advert that aged terribly within the wake of that yr’s crypto crash.
We’re watching the identical story unfold with AI. We’re seeing household-name actors bounce into Super Bowl commercials championing AI corporations for 100 million individuals. Influencers are taking cash from AI corporations to advertise instruments they most likely do not even use and sure do not even perceive, to audiences who’ve grown to belief them.
The distinction is that AI’s dangers transcend monetary loss. We’re speaking about job displacement, the erosion of artistic industries, the unfold of misinformation at scale, deepfakes that may destroy reputations and, as talked about earlier, the environmental price of operating these large fashions.
For this reason I admire artists like Guillermo del Toro who speaks realistically about AI. When fashions that referenced his distinctive visual style went viral, he did not mince phrases about generative AI educated on artists’ work with out their permission, compensation or respect for copyright laws. He known as it theft.
Other artists and public figures have been equally direct in regards to the menace AI poses to their livelihoods and craft. In the meantime, tech executives and builders dismiss these issues as the most recent wave of Luddism.
Whereas I usually imagine that well-known individuals are not position fashions to comply with or belief, many individuals do. They assume that if somebody with credentials or celeb is enthusiastically selling one thing, then it have to be secure, helpful and inevitable. That public belief comes with duty.
If you are going to insist on speaking about AI in public, taking $600,000 to advertise Microsoft Copilot to hundreds of thousands on social media or, should you’re the NFL, partnering with an AI company in a industrial airing through the greatest sporting occasion in America, you will have an obligation to current the total image — particularly to audiences who’re simply studying about it.
Converse in regards to the limitations. Speak in regards to the jobs which can be being eradicated. Point out the artists whose work is being scraped with out consent to coach these fashions. Acknowledge the staggering vitality consumption. Clarify how straightforward it’s to generate convincing misinformation. Disclose while you’re paid by an AI firm to say what you are saying.
This does not imply you’ll be able to’t focus on the chances and advantages of AI. It has actual potential to speed up drug discovery, enhance illness outcomes and remedy advanced issues. However framing it as pure progress and innovation — as an unalloyed good — is ignorant or misleading.
Just like the surrealist work that emerged after World Warfare I, AI is revolutionary, provocative and disruptive. They each problem the methods we see the world.
However surrealism was intentional and deeply human, rooted in our minds and expressions and feelings. Generative AI is machine-driven sample recognition. Surrealism was created to defy conventions and attain the final word reality and authenticity.
We nonetheless deserve the reality now. The dialog round AI is going on, whether or not we prefer it or not, and it is occurring quick. The least we are able to ask is that the individuals main that dialog inform us the info of the matter.
