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Two artists from a Bay Area studio unveiled What Iceberg?, a table-sized installation placed at the public entrance to an OpenAI developer event in San Francisco on Tuesday. According to a description of the piece, the 5-foot-tall sculpture “shows OpenAI’s leaders and investors escaping a sinking ship with unimaginable wealth, while everyone else is left to face the cost of AI.” One of the co-creators of the piece, a man in his “late 30s” who gave his name as “Kevin,” said that he and members of the Berkeley-based Odd Friend Studio spent the last five days working to build What Iceberg? out of papier mâché, cardboard, paint—and a repurposed table. “I think most people focus on this concept of the iceberg,” Kevin told Ars. “The inevitable collision—I think it’s a very obvious metaphor. I think the real metaphor is that this AI world we’re living in is much like the Titanic. There was always a contingency plan for the rich and wealthy. The rest of us? The workers of the lower decks? We are the ones that are going to suffer the consequences.” Kevin told Ars that while the piece cost relatively little in monetary value, it had a different kind of cost to make.
document fetched 2026-09-30 03:00 · canonical https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/what-iceberg-bay-area-artists-target-openai-with-titanic-themed-protest-art