John Berger
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by John Berger. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate John Berger's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal
The passage that stopped me was not about technology. It was about a painting of a woman looking out at me from a canvas, and the question of who had arranged her there, and for whom, and what the arrangement concealed about the world that produced it.
I was reading John Berger's *Ways of Seeing* at a moment when I should have been building. Claude was open in another tab. I had a prototype to finish, a chapter to draft, a team waiting on direction. But Berger had asked a question that made all of that feel slightly fraudulent: *What are the actual conditions of production, and who benefits from your not examining them?*
He was talking about oil paintings. About the European tradition of rendering