Session with The Royal Academy Bhutan: Exploring AI - boon or bane; a Specific Focus on AI in Art

Our session started with introductions and a fun fact from everyone, then a quick poll: by what year would AI have completely replaced teachers, doctors and artists? Guesses were all over the place, and the room got even more divided when I screenshared a set of images and asked people to spot which ones were made by AI. Plenty of us got it wrong, which made the point better than any slide could. From there we looked at where AI is already showing up, in schools, hospitals, customer service, factories and creative work, and laid out the two sides of the jobs debate. One side says AI will open up new industries and free people from repetitive tasks, the way earlier technologies did. The other says routine jobs will vanish faster than workers can retrain, and that lower-skilled people will be hit hardest. The longest stretch of the session was open discussion. We asked which jobs are most at risk and whether they are jobs anyone really wants, which governments could afford reskilling or unemployment support, and whether it is fair for a company to swap workers for AI just because it is cheaper. Someone pointed out that the people using AI for efficiency are usually the ones who already have the most, and that kept coming back for the rest of the night. We then split into two motions. The first was whether governments should slow the pace of AI development, which got us talking about what profit-driven companies are willing to rush out and what goes wrong when models are trained on thin or lopsided data. The second was whether AI in art has done more harm than good. Some argued it lets people without natural talent take part and helps small businesses with their marketing, while others held that art matters because a person made it. We closed by asking everyone to name one opportunity and one risk, and what had shifted their thinking. Most of us left with more questions than answers, which felt about right.