As I stood in front of a black screen, a luminous alien creature with five legs and translucent antennae appeared. After a minute, it morphed into an isopod with larger, more articulated limbs. *Fathoms (Tartarapelagic)*, 2025–26, by Miljohn Ruperto, uses AI to generate otherworldly creatures like these, all based on species recently discovered in the Pacific Ocean’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ). But there’s a dark irony: the extensive mining of manganese, nickel, copper, and cobalt in the CCZ—minerals essential for AI technology—have endangered the lives of the actual species.

Nearly every billboard on the road into Palo Alto—where Ruperto’s work is on view at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center—advertises a different AI tool. There, Ruperto suggests that to know is partly to destroy.

“I think of it as a moral position,” Ruperto said, when I asked him about this bind.…