By Catherine Maticka
In his essay The Intelligence Age, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman claims that AI is guiding us into a utopian future. We are entering a new era of ‘shared prosperity’ he says, in which ‘fixing the climate’ and ‘establishing a space colony’ will happen with the click of a button (Altman, 2024, para. 18). Altman is what you could call a futurist. He is determined to convince us that AI is a magical antidote; a cure to the global crises that ail our world today.
Yet, it's unclear if OpenAI’s recent projects, such as Sora, offer a positive contribution to the world at all, let alone realise these utopian visions. Following the global success of ChatGPT, Sora was a text-to-video model that demanded copious amounts of energy and natural resources. Oh, but who really minds about the environmental costs, when you can create AI slop videos of anything your heart desires?
Unfortunately for fans of such content, OpenAI announced in March 2026 that it would be shutting down Sora for good (OpenAI, 2026, para. 1). Despite the angsty essay that you are about to read, I want to preface this by stating that I am not strictly anti-AI. I do believe it is important to leave room for nuance in these conversations. As a visual art student, however, I can’t help but develop a personal vendetta against generative tools like Sora.
I find myself rolling my eyes at Altman, who vividly reminds me of the avant-garde figures I studied in my first year of art school. There was one avant-garde group in particular that left me equally fascinated and enraged; the 20th century Italian Futurists. Most of all, their leader, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti was born into a wealthy family, but instead of following in his lawyer father’s footsteps, he pursued a career as a poet and provocateur. As was trendy back in the 1900s, he also started an overtly misogynistic and proudly fascist avant-garde movement: Futurism.
In 1909, Marinetti published the first of a long series of futurist manifestos, in which he declared his ‘scorn for woman’ and worshiped the ‘violence’ of technological progress (p. 21). Yay, don’t you love this guy already? There was no medium that the Futurists left unexplored: painting, poetry, literature, sculpture, film, photography, music, architecture, experimental ‘noise’ art, they were willing to try anything. I’ll admit it, the Futurists created beautiful artworks. They embraced modern imagery, novel technologies, and celebrated the opportunities brought about by industrialisation.
While there were several female Futurists, including Benedetta Cappa, Giannina Censi, and Wanda Wulz, they were few and far between. Marinetti’s manifesto was not exactly a warm invitation. The Futurist desire to ‘destroy…feminism’ is what fascinates me the most, as I sit here looking through my old notes (Marinetti, 1909, p. 21-22). There was a particular image of masculinity that they were desperate to attain. They idealised the ‘man at the wheel’, the man in full control, the man who rules over the natural world (Marinetti, 1909, p. 21-22). Above all, they were powered by a cultish worship of progress and a belief that all problems can be solved by blindly pummeling forwards.
Marinetti’s view of the future, although admirably optimistic at times, was nevertheless narrow, exclusionary, and ignorant of anything outside his ideals. If his philosophy sounds familiar, that’s because it’s exactly what contemporary futurists are regurgitating, over a century later. OpenAI’s CEO Altman boasts that humanity is on the verge of ‘The Intelligence Age’, and yet conveniently ignores the increasing environmental impacts of his new AI data centers (Stevens, 2024, para. 2).
I personally don’t see how the endless, resource intensive generation of AI content on platforms like Sora is doing anything to achieve Altman’s vision of ‘shared prosperity’ (2024, para. 5). Likewise, it’s often unclear if the futurist artworks of the 1910s actually represent Marinetti’s grand proclamations. For all of Marinetti’s bravado, the image of man as an all-controlling force is nowhere to be seen. Instead, I’ve always felt as if the most enduring futurist works depict a deeply anxious attitude towards technology.
Take for instance, Umberto Boccioni’s The City Rises, 1910, one of my favourite Futurist paintings. A flame-red horse ruptures through a crowd of construction workers, whose bodies bend around it on a gravity defying angle. Boccioni renders the flurry of activity in a whirlwind of brushstrokes, so that the men and horses alike appear to be ‘composed of whirring electrons’ (Poggi, 2009, p. 101). The humans in the scene are not in control by any means. Instead, their contorted forms seem to disappear into the horse’s energy. The horse, composed out of countless flicks of red paint, appears volatile and unsolid as it propels humanity forwards, for better or for worse.
Another interesting painting is Gino Severini’s Armoured Train, 1915, which depicts a military train as it ruptures through the natural landscape in a mosaic of diagonal lines. The mathematical shapes of the train ‘eclipse’ the environment, stratifying nature through a technoscientific lens (MOMA, n.d). Smooth, abstract shapes visualise Marinetti’s proclamation of war as ‘the world’s only hygiene’ (1909, p. 22). Upon first glance, this artwork might be read as a straightforward celebration of military power.
However, the soldiers in Armoured Train are eerily eradicated into abstraction. Rather than represented as powerful individuals, the men are reduced to geometric segments of the larger military machine. Ironically, Severini never actually took part in the war, after illness prevented him from enlisting in 1914 (MOMA, n.d). Armoured Train’s flattened composition therefore also reveals the artist’s own abstract idea of war. Severini’s avoidance of any graphic realities conveys his view of militarism as a heroic escape from ‘Italy’s anachronistic, moribund past’ (Bowler, 1992, p. 57).
Sure, these paintings could be read as surface level tributes to ‘the beauty of speed’, as Marinetti probably hoped (1909, p. 21). Yet, a closer interrogation reveals the Futurists’ underlying ambivalence towards the shocks of industrialisation. In Renato Poggioli’s The Theory of the Avant-Garde, he coins ‘the agonistic moment’, which he describes as a psychological response to the chaos of modernity. This provoked avant-gardes to crave an ‘apocalypse or crisis ridden era’ that would clear the way for future utopia (Poggioli, 1968, p. 72). Through this lens, Futurism’s enthusiasm for mechanised violence appears more like a ‘defensive strategy’ in response to the disintegration of traditional social structures (Poggi, 2009, p. 267).
A century later, I wonder if we are now living in the apocalyptic era that the Futurists yearned for. It definitely feels like it, as I swipe through headlines on social media, the speed of violence and destruction impossible to comprehend. An algorithmically generated assortment of tragedies is condensed between my fingertips at all times, heavy like a ton of bricks, yet simultaneously weightless as I scroll, scroll, scroll, trapped in an endless pixel vortex.
Of course, technological advancement will be essential to solving the global crises that plague our world today. As I said, I’m not anti-AI and I do see the possibilities it holds. However, I doubt that the endless, unregulated development of generative AI is somehow inherently positive, and is somehow classified as ‘progress’. Progress for who?
For the teenage girls who have their faces plastered onto deepfake AI content by their male peers and circulated around their high schools? For the millions of barely-paid workers training data for AI models? For those living in small island states who are already being displaced from their homes by rising sea levels?
In November 2025, the United Nations held the 30th Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Brazil. Towards the conclusion of the conference, scientist Carlos Nobre warned that fossil fuel consumption must be reduced to zero by 2040 to avoid disastrous global temperature rises of up to 2.5 celsius (Carvalho, 2025, para. 6).
We are in a situation more dire than the 1910s avant-gardes could have ever envisioned. Yet, the ‘futurists’ of our era remain transfixed by the same naive ideals that Marinetti worshipped over a century ago. Addressing the climate crisis requires collaborative effort from individuals, governments, businesses, and international organisations. Instead of enabling the endless development of AI language models and data centers, the wealthy futurists of today need to fund climate action initiatives, so that we can have a future of any kind.
Reference List
Altman, S. (2024, September 23). The Intelligence Age. Samaltman.com. https://ia.samaltman.com/
Bowler, A. E. (1992). Art and politics in the historical avant-garde (pp. 57-59). University Microfilms International.
de Carvalho, F. (2025, November 22). Belém COP30 delivers climate finance boost and a pledge to plan fossil fuel transition. UN News. https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/11/1166433?_gl=1
Marinetti, F. T., et al. (2001). The founding and manifesto of futurism 1909; manifesto of the futurist painters and futurist painting: Technical manifesto 1910. In Futurist manifestos (pp. 19-31). Tate.
Poggi, C. (2009). Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism. Princeton University Press.
Poggioli, R. (1968). The Theory of the Avant-Garde (pp. 20-72). The Belknap Press.
Stevens, H. (2024). In a new manifesto, OpenAI’s Sam Altman envisions an AI utopia – and reveals glaring blind spots. The Conversation. https://doi.org/10.64628/aa.nspr34ewp
Author Bio
Hi! I’m Catherine (she/her), a Brisbane based visual artist in my third year at QUT. Often exploring feminist, political and technological contexts in my work, I aim to interrogate what it means to be human, in the face of AI and algorithmic culture. I’m looking forward to putting on my rose coloured glasses and reminiscing on the past for our upcoming issue, Timestamp!