Go has always been the most beautiful game in the world to me. The sound of a stone on a board, the simplicity of its rules, the beauty of its design.
A person's playstyle is an expression of themselves—like seeing an artist's style in a painting—it's personal and filled with meaning.
Today, no human player has a chance of defeating a top AI Go program. It’s used religiously in professional training. With AlphaGo, our relationship with Go as an art form was changed forever.
I grew up studying Lee Sedol's games and photographed his matches at major tournaments like the Ing Cup (sometimes nicknamed the Olympics of Go!).
I loved hearing about his stories, the fearlessness of his play, the rebellious nature of his personality; his basic ass jokes that you wouldn’t quite expect from someone like him to say to me—“Why did you only bring your photobook, and not the models too?!”
His games were chaotic and an absolute delight (and impossible) to study. And time and again he changed the way things were done.
At 17, he had an incredible 32-game win streak and was already able to defeat professional 9-dan players even though he was only 3-dan in rank.
As a result, he opted to remain 3-dan and not play in rank up matches—because not only were they poor indicators of strength and inefficient back then, but playing would also have unfairly tanked the chance of weaker players from advancing. (If they had to face someone like him who was 3-dan on paper, but 9-dan in strength, their loss would naturally not reflect their actual strengths.)
In the end, his refusal to play in ranking matches forced the Korea Baduk Association to change its promotion rules, and made it possible for future world and national tournament winners to receive rank advancements, without having to play unnecessary matches.
Lee Sedol made so much of Go history and was an icon of our time, a role model for me.
So to see him say that if he were to choose again, he wouldn't become a pro—because of AI. Words can't adequately describe how heartbroken I feel to hear this.
Even though I know the game of Go will carry on just like chess has all these years, I can't help feeling sad for how we will never experience some things the same way ever again.
The greatest story of a player post-AI won't be overwhelming victories like Go Seigen's jubango. It will be someone who can come close to defeating an AI.
Even though I know that the game of Go will continue on, but still, I mourn for the version of Go that I loved and once knew, which will never exist again.
Lee Sedol is largely cheerful in his interview, and Google took the opportunity to talk about generative AI, of course. I’m sad about a number of different things, but I guess I never quite wrote about how the AlphaGo games made me feel, so I suppose here it is.
I used to run a Go blog, competed as a scrubby amateur, and travelled to cover tournaments. I hosted stream translation groups during the AlphaGo matches to help explain commentaries from Chinese pros outside of the English stream.
I stopped updating the Go blog after those games. I was overcome by a feeling I couldn’t shake off, and never did.
But I did spend a lot of time thinking about how it would translate to my own world since, about how AI might impact art-making in my fields (and part of why I built Cara). So unlike most artists, I suppose I had a 6-year head start to process the generative AI shock to our system, what might be possible, and how it might make me feel.
Regardless of my feelings—at the very least, Go is still watched as a sport played by humans, and pros have kept their jobs. For that, I am glad.
But for work impacted by AI now—art, design, software engineering, sales, marketing, customer support… there is really only incentive for companies to replace or reduce people in most cases.
So even if I could separate the emotional feeling of sadness towards art and what it means to me, the reality where our images and names are used without consent, to make the replacement for jobs at scale across society, with seemingly no real social safety net proposed by governments to handle the fallout. Well, it’s almost nice to be sad about Go when it didn’t hurt people quite the same way.
If you're curious about the Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo games, I recommend watching the exceedingly well-made documentary. It's approachable and always an emotional watch for me: