The Crown of Louis XV of France
In 1530, the French Crown Jewels were declared state property, belonging to the nation rather than an individual monarch. Yet, for his 1722 coronation, King Louis XV commissioned his crown to be encrusted with these public treasures. Although he did not legally own the gems he wore, Louis XV leveraged their wealth to project an aura of absolute, untouchable personal authority. The state’s public treasury was transformed into a privatized spectacle, elevating a single ruler above the citizens who owned it.
OpenAI’s Training Data
Founded in 2001, Wikipedia became one of the largest public repositories of human knowledge. As large language models emerged, this vast, crowdsourced repository became a training substrate. To build its AI empire, OpenAI scraped Wikipedia to train ChatGPT. Although OpenAI never owned this collective wisdom, it leveraged the public’s intellectual wealth to project technological authority. A public source of knowledge was transformed into a commercial product, elevating one company above the people who created it.
The French Crown
Electronic displays, brass, acrylic, wood
30x30x45 cm
2026
© dirkes.studio