AI’s impact on existential questions of the self and our future interaction with nonhuman entities. Few, though, have taken the technologies and innovations of AI as the underlying materials of their work and sculpted them to their own vision. An exception is the artist Ian Cheng, who has gone as far as to construct entire worlds of artificial beings with varying degrees of sentience and intelligence. He refers to these worlds as Live Simulations. His Emissaries trilogy (2015-2017) is set in a fictional postapocalyptic world of flora and fauna, in which AJ-driven animals and creatures explore the landscape and interact with each other. Cheng uses advanced graphics but has them programmed with a lot of glitches and imperfections, which imparts a futuristic and anachronistic atmosphere at the same time. Through his trilogy, which charts a history of consciousness, he asks the question “What is a simulation?” While the majority of artistic works that utilize recent developments in AI specifically draw from the field of machine learning, Cheng’s Live Simulations take a separate route. The protagonists and plot lines that are interlaced in each episodic simulation of Emissaries use the complex logic systems and rules of AI. What is profound about his continually evolving scenes is that complexity arises not through the desire/actions of any single actor or artificial godhead but instead through their constellation, collision, and constant evolution in symbiosis with one another. This gives rise to unexpected outcomes and unending, unknowable situations—you can never experience the exact same moment in successive viewings of his work. Cheng had a discussion at the Serpentine Marathon “GUEST, GHOST, HOST: MACHINE!” with the programmer Richard Evans, who recently designed Versu, an AI- based platform for interactive storytelling games. Evans’ work emphasizes the social interaction of the games’ characters, who react in a spectrum of possible behaviors to the choices made