B urning Man has spent the last three decades arguing over what Silicon Valley gets to bring to the desert playa: sushi, satellite internet, turnkey luxury camps, the workarounds that let a camp staff its "radical self-reliance” with chefs and professional kitchens and bodyguards to police VIP RVs.

AI has given that fight has a new interface: the prompt box.

As generative AI creeps into theme camp flyers and art installations, Burners are sparring over whether the tools are being used as a new form of desert ingenuity, or just the latest version of tech wealth commandeering a handmade culture and turning it into homogenized AI slop.

A few weeks before heading to the Portal Burn – one of the offshoot, regional versions of the long-running desert festival in Nevada that starts Sunday – Rowan Larkin was scrolling through the event’s Facebook group and noticed an unmistakable pattern.

Many of the digital flyers, which participants commonly create to advertise their theme camp parties and workshops put on were riddled with made-by-AI tells: the warped typography, that uncanny machine gloss, the overstuffed ornamentation. To Larkin, who goes by the playa name “Jolly Rancher,” the synthetic posters felt like an unwelcome invasion of Burning Man’s DIY zeitgeist—counterculture content farm cruft that had skipped the hard part..

“I'm so much more interested in the creative process, the trial and error, the insanity that goes into being an artist and creating things,” Larkin told Forbes . “It's taken away when generative AI is used. If it's just a prompt, it's not interesting. It's not compelling. It's not what I enjoy art for."

So Larkin did what Burners do: she made an art installation and took it to the regional event. It was an interactive workstation covered in AI-related ills: hand-traced articles highlighting intellectual property stolen from artists, charts of deleterious AI data center water and energy consumption, and studies warning of cognitive decline due to over-reliance on AI. Though Larkin initially feared blowback from pro-AI Burners, the installation struck an immediate chord on the ground with attendees who flocked to it to share their deep misgivings about generative AI.

First held on San Francisco’s Baker Beach in 1986, Burning Man has grown into a cultural behemoth that annually welcomes 70,000 revelers to a remote desert in Nevada, where they construct a temporary metropolis of community, art, and “radical self-reliance” before burning a giant wooden effigy.

The festival has existed uncomfortably with the tech community since the Dotcom boom. Tech billionaires like Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Elon Musk have all attended, partying inside luxurious camps tricked out with generators, AC and catering staff. In recent years, there has been controversy over people using Starlink satellite internet service to work remotely and go live on social media. Burning Man’s ongoing entanglement with tech wealth and its insistence that every hard thing can be made easier with money has long tested the event’s founding principles. AI is its latest manifestation and it’s dividing the playa along familiar cultural fault lines.

“If no one bothered to create it, why should I bother to look at it?” wrote one critic in a Reddit thread devoted to the topic. “Gross. Low effort. Immediate turnoff. It gives FLACCID energy.”

Burning Man, the non-profit, has adopted a mostly hands-off stance. AI generated art is not banned, but the organization has established guardrails. Artists applying for Burning Man-sponsored grant money to fund their art projects, must disclose AI use. If they submit AI-generated mockups, they’re encourage to also submit mockups created by human hands.

Burning Man Director of Art Katie Hazard, who oversees the 400-some art installations at the festival, believes that AI could both help artists who don’t have the money or skills to create renderings, but also risks flooding the desert with a homogenized slop.

"Burning Man has grown up alongside Silicon Valley and the tech world and we've been developing in these parallel paths, but there's a lot of intersection between the two,” she said. “And this is a great place to experiment related to technology or to anything.”

Those who support AI view it in a way similar to those who champion it as a productivity tool; they argue it helps people enjoy Burning Man more by easing the hard work of setting up art installations and planning events through helping with things like scheduling volunteer shifts or drafting budgets.

“What does that leave the humans to do? I'm an optimist,” said Kim Carson, a Bay Area and Mexico-based AI strategy consultant. “So I think it's to actually spend time to actually drop in, to actually create community, and not be so focused on creating infrastructure.”

Carson is bringing her own interactive AI art piece to Burning Man. Dubbed the Portal of Collective Imagination, it’s a circular arch lined with LED screens and powered entirely by localized small AI models that don’t need internet connectivity. Visitors approach a podium and speak their hopes for the future into a microphone. The local AI models process the audio, translating each voice into a digital star that drifts across the archway towards other stars that share similar emotional themes.

Other artists are taking a more satirical approach.

Oakland-based artist Sydney Parcell is installing Big Brain Billboards, a series of double-sided highway signs mocking the deluge of AI startup advertisements that blanket San Francisco’s Highway 101. “Have bad AI ads taken over your precious landscape? You may be entitled to compensation,” one reads. “AI can’t save you; cultivate community!” reads another. The billboards are accompanied by a besuited three-headed monster bearing the faces of tech executives Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

It’s a fun philosophical debate, and perhaps AI can automate away some mundane logistics to free up time for authentic connection at events like Burning Man. In the meantime, it’s doing the exact opposite for people like Parcell. On her way to the playa with her anti-AI billboards in tow, her van blew a coolant hose, stranding her in Colfax. She called AAA for roadside assistance and was immediately trapped in a circular loop with an AI customer service agent.

“AI made it so much harder,” Parcell said, whose installation launch was delayed by the ordeal. “People want to use AI to replace humans, but in the end, we all just need a human.”