For his explosion event in Los Angeles, Cai Guo-Qiang built his own version of ChatGPT and employed a drone army to answer the question: what is the fate of humanity and AI?

For decades, Cai Guo-Qiang has been the world’s foremost fine artist of explosions. He is famous for his massive fireworks displays, from his glowing footsteps in the sky at the opening of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, to his 2015 Sky Ladder, a 1,650-foot flaming ladder to heaven featured in a Netflix documentary.

Recently, the gunpowder artist has become obsessed with a new threatening technology: artificial intelligence.