What happens when you put six tech bros in a room together? An artist used AI to find out Rebecca Cairns, CNNSeptember 1, 2025 at 5:13 AM Sputniko! uses AI to generate "tech bros" which take inspiration from the philosophies and ideas of billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
- - What happens when you put six tech bros in a room together? An artist used AI to find out
Rebecca Cairns, CNNSeptember 1, 2025 at 5:13 AM
Sputniko! uses AI to generate "tech bros" which take inspiration from the philosophies and ideas of billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. - Courtesy of the artist
When Hiromi Ozaki created six AI-generated "tech bros" to debate each other about the future of humanity, she had no idea how quickly, and how closely, reality would imitate art.
"Like, it's not really about votes anymore, it's about who's controlling the algorithms," argues one of the avatars, a square-jawed, blond man.
"It really makes you wonder," posits another of the fictional personas, whose personalities were trained on the philosophies and ideas of billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. "Where does free will even factor in?"
The characters — who appear on large screen panels in a video installation — are based on Ozaki's face and voice, but were reimagined as White men. They were designed to embody the "stereotypical tech bro figure," said the Japanese-British artist, better known as Sputniko!, in a video interview.
The result is eerie, with the avatars discussing topics ranging from the future of the working class to the fate of democracy, with chilly indifference.
Sputniko! created 'Tech Bros' in her likeness using AI. - Osamu Sakamoto/Courtesy Kotaro Nukaga
The project debuted at Ozaki's solo show in Tokyo last year, just days before the US Presidential election and the subsequent creation of the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This month, it will show at the Ars Electronica Festival in Austria, followed by a three-month long exhibition at The Art Gallery at Brooklyn College in New York.
While the work reflects the artist's growing wariness of technology, particularly AI, she feels it has taken on even more relevance in light of current events.
Tech elites, she says, are increasingly in charge of the narrative.
"They have so much power, so much money, and they're really talking about humanity like they have total control."
Technophile to tech-fatigued
Ozaki hasn't always been so pessimistic about technology, once drawn to the field as "something capable of changing our society and structure." The daughter of two math professors, Ozaki studied math and computer science at Imperial College London, before pursuing a master's degree in design. She was also an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, where she founded a group looking into the impact of emerging technologies.
Sputniko! uses AI to analyze footage of passing clouds and then applies a rainbow effect over it in "Can I Believe in a Fortunate Tomorrow?" - Courtesy the artist
Technology has always featured heavily in her immersive art, from the "Menstruation Machine" (2010) — a wearable device that simulates abdominal pain and releases blood, to mimic the experience of menstruation — to "Bionic" (2017), sculptural garments made in collaboration with a lab-grown meat company and a balloon artist, exploring alternative materials in fashion.
The artist has examined technology's growing potential using machines, robotics and the creation of digital worlds to communicate complex ideas. It has also been pivotal in promoting her work, with videos going viral on social media and grabbing the attention of major institutions, from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo to New York's Museum of Modern Art, which would later go on to showcase her films.
Since the pandemic, her perspective has shifted. Where she once considered it essential for a more equitable and progressive future, she now sees developments of cutting-edge technologies like AI deepening social and economic inequalities, spreading misinformation and negatively changing the way people think and interact.
She explored this feeling in a recent solo exhibition, "Can I Believe in a Fortunate Tomorrow?" which, in addition to the aforementioned "Tech Bro Debates Humanity," featured two other thought-provoking video installations.
The artist's work "Can I Believe in a Fortunate Tomorrow?" emulates iridescent cloud formations. - Osamu Sakamoto/Courtesy Kotaro Nukaga
The show's titular work is an AI-simulated video showing the optical phenomenon known as "saiun" — when the sun shines through iridescent clouds and creates streams of rainbow–colored light, a good luck symbol in some Asian cultures. It's an uncommon sight, in the real world: but with AI, the phenomenon can be constantly simulated.
And in "Drone in Search for a Four-Leaf Clover," a drone scans a field of green clovers, instantly identifying several four-leafed versions hidden in the grass. Clovers typically have three leaves, but a rare mutation occasionally produces a fourth, and so the elusive four-leaf clover has long been associated with good luck and happiness in Celtic cultures.
Both works consider the true cost of AI-driven efficiency: in the former, how much does rarity, chance and surprise add to pleasure; in the latter, is the joy found in having the clover, or the quest itself?
A drone programmed with image recognition algorithms scans a field of clovers. - Courtesy the artist
Her works evoke the clichéd quote often attributed to American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Life is a journey, not a destination." In the era of AI, how much of the journey are we still partaking in?
Ozaki isn't the only one feeling tech-fatigued. Digital burnout is on the rise, particularly among Gen Z and Millennials, who increasingly want to disconnect from digital devices.
While technology has often been hailed as a way to reduce our workload — Ozaki cites economist John Maynard Keynes, who speculated in 1930 that within a century, technology would be so advanced we'd only need to work 15-hour weeks — it's far from the truth.
In most nations, work hours steadily declined throughout the 20th century, but since the 1990s, economists say this trend has stagnated, or in the case of the US, reversed, with "extreme" working hours increasing in many economically developed nations. The digitalization of work and widespread internet connectivity — which allows remote working and 24/7 connection to a work phone and emails — are both contributing factors. Ozaki sees the rejection of "hustle culture" by many young people as a recognition that it props up an "unequal system" in which it's impossible to win.
"There's been so much technological progress, but we don't work 15-hour weeks," she said, adding that instead of working less, we are producing more, with wealthy stakeholders benefitting rather than workers.
Artist, activist, entrepreneur
Despite her growing concerns about the way technology impacts our lives, Ozaki has used it to tackle social inequalities outside of her work as an artist.
In 2019, seeking to address the lack of women's healthcare services in Japan, she co-founded Cradle, a startup that works with dozens of companies, including Hitachi and Honda, to equip their employees with better resources for their wellbeing.
A portrait of Hiromi Ozaki (Sputniko!). - Mami Arai
Its employee-facing services, launched in 2022, include e-seminars on various health topics, virtual medical consultations and employer-subsidized coupons at partner clinics — and while initially for women, the online platform now caters to men and trans people, too. For employers, Cradle helps to identify gaps in healthcare coverage and advises on how to improve health and DEI policies, among other services.
For Ozaki, her company — which she hopes to float on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in the next couple of years — is a "medium," like video, music, or canvas, for expressing her values and exploring ideas.
Ozaki is aware of the implicit paradox of being an anti-capitalist "artist activist" who also owns a business and works with major corporations. "I started out hating capitalism," she explained, "but I decided to understand it, hack it, use it as a tool for social change."
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