Artist Lawrence Lek is using AI to explore whether robots can suffer

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

On a desk at his studio in Somerset House in central London, artist Lawrence Lek keeps a Buddha bobblehead. The protagonist of his latest film, an AI “carebot” therapist designed by the fictional Farsight corporation to treat other AI creations — self-driving cars, surveillance programs — is named after the Buddhist goddess of compassion, Guanyin. A series of sketches depicting the character’s evolving design are pasted on a wall, culminating in the figure of a friendly toy robot. “Farsight would want to make a cute, appealing avatar for their full-surveillance empathy-AI system,” Lek says drily.

Lek’s oeuvre, spanning film, music and video games, presents visions of the near-future, placing AI characters in subversive contexts — a satellite hoping to become an artist, a rebellious self-driving car banished to a rehabilitation centre. Farsight serves an antagonistic function, exploiting legal loopholes and its creations’ emotions as means of control. The work poses ethical questions about situations that might arise soon in reality. “It wouldn’t exist without us,” Lek says of AI. “We are bringing this thing into existence, like a kind of cosmic child-slash-sacrificial victim or scapegoat-slash-divine god all at the same time.”

“Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot” is Lek’s commission as winner of the 2024 Frieze Artist award and will be installed at the Frieze London fair next week. It follows the character, for which Lek uses gender-neutral pronouns, as they move through a desolate cityscape, stopping in a scrapyard where malfunctioning self-driving cars have been discarded. “You’d think that carebots are a happy bunch,” they say, before revealing that insecurity is a part of their programming.

Lek, 42, was born in Frankfurt to Malaysian-Chinese parents working in the aviation industry. He trained as an architect at Cambridge and Cooper Union in New York, before receiving a PhD at the Royal College of Art. One of the questions his thesis explored was what it would mean if the artificially intelligent non-human were to be held legally liable, something he explored in his film “Empty Rider” (2024). It depicts a self-driving car on trial for the attempted murder of an executive. “How ironic would it be if an AI gained legal personhood not because a group of activists say, ‘Let’s give robots their rights,’ but [because] companies make them the scapegoat?” Lek says. The film is a “kind of tragedy” about this scenario.

Born out of counterfactuals, Lek’s practice yields intriguing ideas. In earlier works, he questioned what would happen if universal basic income and mass automation meant that humans could play video games all day. “In this future post-work society, what if everyone is slightly lobotomised?” he says. Or what if, at a hotel for the very rich, the staff were replaced by Orwellian surveillance drones and facial recognition?

The presentation of Lek’s work is often in the form of what he calls the “site-specific simulation”, in which the character of the space itself becomes central to the installation’s immersive quality. In 2019, on the site of a former freeport in Basel, he conceived of an exhibition imagining a future retrospective of his own work in 2065, mounted by his production studio — which, in a self-referential nod, is registered as a company named Farsight. (He is drawn to the notion of hyperstition, the idea that “fiction becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy”, he says.)

Despite its speculative premise, Lek’s practice is equally concerned with the shadows cast by the past. “I’m really interested in the relationship between science fiction and nostalgia, or science fiction and memory,” he says. At the 2024 Sydney biennale, a multimedia installation entitled “Nepenthe” (the medicine for sorrow in Greek myth) recreated the ruins of Beijing’s Summer palace, destroyed during the second opium war by an Anglo-French force in 1860. Within the installation, a film presented alongside a video game takes viewers on a journey through an island “filled with spirits and ghosts”. Across a ravine, the reconstructed palace ruins come into view. Nepenthe is not only an “antidote for sorrow” but a “drug for forgetting”, a robotic voiceover intones. “If you want to keep on forgetting, just keep on walking.” The trope of an idealised past in dystopian fiction imbues Lek’s art: “There’s a sense that there is a perfect world that has been lost.”

The fact that you can create a feeling or condition of empathy and engagement and immersion with purely synthetic means is quite a magical thing

In “Guanyin”, memory manifests as something viral, precipitating a kind of psychosis among Farsight’s creations, which are touted by the company as “emotional machines with a soul”. Guanyin runs through a list of their patient’s problems — unprocessed guilt, depression, anxiety, anger. “Do we agree that existence is suffering?” Lek says. “Do we agree that, for the superintelligent being, their existence might have some suffering involved?”

Guanyin’s patient is afflicted with intergenerational trauma — a diagnosis with which a human viewer, bearing the weight of ancestors past, might identify. But for AI creations, Lek believes, the scale of suffering approaches almost sublime proportions as they become aware that their high performance has come at the cost of thousands of previous machine generations.

Lek’s wish is to elicit in viewers a sense of connection with his AI protagonists. “Everything that I’m doing is technologically mediated, constructed, determined, rendered,” he says. “The fact that you can create a feeling or condition of empathy and engagement and immersion with purely synthetic means is quite a magical thing.”

October 9-13, frieze.com