Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from On Censorship by Ai Weiwei. It releases in March from Thames & Hudson.
In 2025, the rapid development of artificial intelligence pushed a group of young Chinese entrepreneurs to the forefront with DeepSeek, which propelled its search technology into new territories. This triggered panic within the highly competitive AI landscape, sparking strategic shifts in western-dominated technology ecosystems and causing significant market disruptions. Once again, it forces us to reflect deeply on the rise of AI in the information age. At its core, AI represents a mythical level of information control, which is also the very foundation of any censorship system.
An interesting incident occurred when people tested this new AI tool by asking about me. The AI’s response was blunt: “Let’s talk about something else.” This is precisely the problem. For decades, the Chinese regime has employed similar strategies—refusing to acknowledge the existence of certain topics, denying freedom of expression, enforcing censorship, and systematically purging dissent. While loudly proclaiming slogans like “A Shared Future for Mankind” and “One World, One Dream,” the regime meticulously censors and suppresses the contradictions embedded in reality.
Censorship poses the same challenges to both Chinese and western technological development. In the pursuit of economic and political advantage, humanitarian values and human rights principles are crumbling. At the same time, China’s relentless, self-aggrandizing ambition faces an insurmountable contradiction. Freedom of speech and expression is fundamental to human happiness and development. No matter how powerful China becomes, it cannot escape these ideological “immune system” flaws. Suppressing dissent and purging heterodox thinking will only lead to catastrophic consequences for humanity when combined with new technologies. As we enter the AI era, human collective thought patterns, ideological structures, and the very essence of individual existence and dignity are undeniably under threat.
Artificial intelligence struggles to function fairly, because its judgment, based solely on existing data, is inherently limited. As a result, its conclusions can be biased. For instance, ChatGPT misjudged a selfie I took with a leader of the Alternativ für Deutschland party, Alice Weidel, wrongly identifying it as a fabricated image. ChatGPT’s rationale was based on the information that Ai Weiwei, known for advocating for human rights, supporting migrants, and defending minority groups, would never pose for a selfie with such a figure, the chair of a right-wing populist, nationalist political party. This conclusion was drawn from pre-existing assumptions and social narratives about both me and the other individual. It was inaccurate. What this reveals is telling: ChatGPT, and AI more broadly, is not capable of delivering factual, objective judgments. Instead, it draws upon the prevailing biases, moral, and ethical codes embedded in society, often leading to simplistic, even erroneous conclusions.
The growth of AI has been likened to the spread of a virus or a pandemic, with one crucial difference: it is irreversible. Big data reduces human thought and information to banal, homogenized content, processed unconsciously and indiscriminately through recycling, reorganizing, and reapplying knowledge, akin to waste management. In an instant, AI consumes the vast reservoir of human intellectual history, depleting centuries of accumulated information.
This mechanical, formulaic processing model destroys the underlying logic that has nurtured human thought and development since ancient times. Human experience and cognition are reduced to physical or digital vectorized data, stripping away the organic complexities of reflection and growth. This shift has opened up a vast, boundless space for the degradation of thought and the emergence of an intellectually diminished society. Within this expanding void, the pathways of human understanding and the architecture of critical perception are being reshaped and reconstructed. The very possibilities of human cognition, the emergence of self-awareness, and the formation of religion, ethics, and belief systems are being fundamentally altered in this new landscape.
When information and knowledge no longer inspire imagination, willpower, or emotional resonance, they become nothing more than piles of intellectual debris. Thus, the hollow ideology of AI, often described as “non-ideological,” represents an even more profound existential crisis for humanity—the virus infiltrates the central nervous system of human cognition. Its spread and influence, fueled by corporate greed and unchecked capital, are virtually unstoppable. This marks a decisive turning point in human history, an event with consequences as profound as any mythological tale.
We often describe modern technologies as “convenient,” “instant,” and “effortless,” qualities once reserved for the realm of fantasy. Yet every meaningful, memorable human experience is rooted in struggle, perseverance, and the complexity of life’s challenges. This sense of exhilaration and fulfilment has now been replaced by effortless keystrokes, requiring neither strain nor effort.
The rise of AI is fundamentally altering our perception of space and time, and with it the ethical foundations of society, particularly our understanding of freedom. Concepts like effort, sacrifice, responsibility, and duty, which have been the cornerstones of human growth and development, are disappearing. As these ancient values erode, so too do human dignity, individuality, and personal rights.
Human beings are endowed by the heavens with a sense of moral existence and inherent rights, but these will ultimately disintegrate because the very mode of individual existence is being erased by AI’s collective knowledge and informational structures. Humanity has finally created a tool that renders the existence of the individual self meaningless.
What people must recognize is that the true nature of the age of AI and intelligent machines is the Warring States period of intense competition between countries, driven by vast capital and vested interests. Human value is being replaced by the logic of profit, inevitably leading humanity towards a bewildering and savage new era.
The unification brought about by AI has accomplished what traditional censorship systems could never achieve: it has once again trivialized politically correct discourse, replacing humanity’s capacity for critical thinking and dissent with conformity. The transformative power of heterodoxy and deviation within human thought is being systematically neutralized.
Excerpted from On Censorship, by Ai Weiwei
© 2026 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London
Text and illustrations © 2026 Ai Weiwei
Reprinted by permission of Thames & Hudson Inc.
