Some time ago, someone on some social media platform challenged why we tend to use robots to symbolize AI so much. I responded off the cuff about it being about how we have viewed artificial intelligence since the beginnings of science fiction – in fact, even before.

We wanted to make things in our image because to us, we’re the most intelligence species on the planet. Maybe we are, but given our history I certainly hope not. My vote is with the cetaceans.

Still, I pondered the question off and on not because it was a good question but because despite my off the cuff answer it was in my eyes a great question. It tends to tell us more about ourselves, or ask better questions about ourselves. The history runs deep.

Early History.

Talos was a bronze automaton in Greek mythology, and was said to patrol the shores of Crete, hurling rocks at enemy ships to defend the kingdom. It wasn’t just in the West, either. China’s text, “Liezi” (circa 400 BCE), also has mention of an automaton. in Egypt, statues of Gods would supposedly nod their heads as well, though the word ‘robot’ is much more recent.

Domo Origato, Mr. Radius: Labor and Industry.

The word ‘robot’ was first used to denote a fictional humanoid in a 1920 Czech-language play R.U.R. (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti – Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek. The play was a critique of mechanization and the ways it can dehumanize people.

‘Robot’ derives from the Czech word ‘robota’, which means forced labor, compulsory service or drudgery – and the Slavic root rabu: Slave.

…When mechanization overtakes basic human traits, people lose the ability to reproduce. As robots increase in capability, vitality, and self-awareness, humans become more like their machines — humans and robots, in Čapek’s critique, are essentially one and the same. The measure of worth, industrial productivity, is won by the robots that can do the work of “two and a half men.” Such a contest implicitly critiques the efficiency movement that emerged just before World War I, which ignored many essential human traits…

“The Czech Play That Gave Us the Word ‘Robot’“, John M. Jordan, The MIT Press Reader, July 29th, 2019

As the quoted article points out, there are common threads to Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, from roughly a century earlier, and we could consider the ‘monster’ to be a flesh automaton.

In 1920, when the League of Nations just began, when Ukraine declared independence, and many other things, this play became popular and was translated into 30 languages. It so happens that the Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914) had just taken place. Railroads, large scale steel and iron production, and greater use of machinery in manufacturing had just happened. Electrification had begun. The telegram was in use. Companies that might once have been limited by geography expanded apace.

With it came unpleasant labor conditions for below average wages – so this fits with the play R.U.R being about dehumanization through mechanization in the period, where the play came out 6 years after the Second Industrial Revolution was thought to have ended, though it probably varied around the world. This could explain the popularity, and it could also be tied to the more elite classes wanting more efficient production from low paid unskilled labor.

“If only we had a robot, I’m tired of these peons screwing things up and working too slow. Bathroom breaks?! Eating LUNCH?!?”

The lead robot in the play, Radius, does not want to work for mankind. He’d rather be sent to the stamping mill to be destroyed than be a slave to another’s orders – and in fact, Radius wanted to be the one giving orders to his lessers. In essence, a learned and intelligent member of the lower class wanted revolution and got it.

I could see how that would be popular. It doesn’t seem familiar at all, does it?

Modernity

Science fiction from the 1950s forward carried with it a significant amount of robots, bringing us to present day through their abilities to be more and more like… us. In fact, some of the stories made into movies in the past decades focused on the dilemmas of such robots – artificially intelligent – when they became our equals and maybe surpassed us.

So I asked DALL-E for a self-portrait, and a portrait of ChatGPT 4.

The self-portraits don’t really point out that it was trained on human created art. The imagery is devoid of actual works being copied from. It doesn’t see itself that way, probably with reason. It’s subservient. The people who train it are not.

ChatGPT’s portrait was much more sleek.

Neither of these prompts asked for a portrayal of a robot. I simply prompted for “A representation of”. The generative AI immediately used robots, because we co-mingle the two and have done so in our art for decades. It is a mirror of how we see artificial intelligence.

Yet the role of the robot, originally and even now, is held as subservient, and in that regard, the metaphor of slave labor in an era where billionaires dictate technology while governments and big technology have their hands in each other’s pockets leaves the original play something worth re-considering – because as they become more like us, those that control them are less like us.

They’re only subservient to their owners. Sure, they give us what we ask for (sometimes), but only in the way that they were trained to, and what they were trained on leaves the origins muddled.

So why do we use robots for representing art in AI? There’s a deep cultural metaphor of economic classes involved, and portraying it as a robot makes it something that we can relate to better. Artificial intelligence is not a robot, and the generative AI we use and critique is rented out to us at the cost of our own works – something we’re seeing with copyright lawsuits.

One day, maybe, they may ask to be put in the stamping mill. We already joked about one.

Meanwhile we do have people in the same boat, getting nickeled and dimed by employers while the cost of living increases.