'It was like a phone call suddenly connecting' Ai Weiwei. 'It was like a phone call suddenly connecting' Ai Weiwei. 'Was I scared going back to China? He has been jailed, tracked and threatened by China's government. What was it like pay a visit home?

Censorship has been a constant in Ai Weiwei's life. The 68-year-old Chinese dissident, whose activist art has made him among Beijing's most prominent critics, has seen his films, sculptures and other works restricted for their criticisms of China as well as his outspoken advocacy for human rights around the world. Speaking in London ahead of the January 29 launch of his new book On Censorship," he discussed returning to China for the first time in a decade, the impact of AI on freedom of expression, and what he sees as the erosion of free speech in the West. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Art that can be easily replicated by artificial intelligence is "meaningless", according to the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, who believes even Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse would have had to rethink their approach if AI had existed in their era. Ai Weiwei's comments feed into the current charged debate about the rise of AIs that use data scraped from artists' websites to create "original" images in their style. There have been several class-action lawsuits in the US, and artists whose aesthetic is popular among users of AIs have already reported thousands of images that use their work as a base, often without permission. When asked about the issue, Ai Weiwei said: "That's not a problem. I think that kind of art should [have died] a long time ago," before he criticised art teaching that focuses on creating "realistic" images.

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei announced a new documentary at Art Basel Miami Beach, where he has several pieces on display, the Art Newspaper reports. With one film already in the works on animals and the environment, Ai sent a camera team to the Brazilian states of Rondônia, Mato Grosso, and Amazonas to capture footage of the ongoing fires in the Amazon Rainforest, along with another team which went to Pará to shoot cattle farms. This footage will be used for a separate documentary on the fires, as well as in next year's production of Turandot at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, which Ai is directing. Agribusiness and the deforestation of the Amazon are inextricably linked issues. Ai said in his announcement: "We can clearly see that the fires are a part of a wide-ranging and premeditated plan to cause deforestation to increase land use for agriculture and cattle farming."

On a fine early afternoon in late March a young German-Iranian friend and I walked into the Garage Gallery at the Fire Station in Doha, Qatar - and we wondered. We were there to see the famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's "Laundromat": "A traveling installation", as the official description of the exhibition says, "that brings the current European migrant crisis into sharp focus." We had read before that "the work is centered around a vast makeshift camp near the village of Idomeni, on the border with the Republic of Macedonia. As part of his recently released documentary Human Flow, Ai Weiwei has borne witness to the brutal plight of refugees worldwide." Does the brutal plight of refugees worldwide - those from Syria in particular - need a witness?

A multiple-exposure portrait of Chinese contemporary artist and human rights activist Ai Weiwei, made on film in Beverly Hills, on the occasion of his new documentary, "Human Flow." A multiple-exposure portrait of Chinese contemporary artist and human rights activist Ai Weiwei, made on film in Beverly Hills, on the occasion of his new documentary, "Human Flow." (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) Ai Weiwei is nothing if not prolific. He spent the better part of 2016 traveling around the globe visiting refugee camps for his new documentary feature film, "Human Flow," debuting in theaters this month. He's made so much art that he currently has work in 12 museum and gallery exhibitions around the world -- eight of them solo shows. In New York, the contemporary artist and social justice activist is installing some 300 works across the city's five boroughs for the Public Art Fund exhibition "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors," opening Oct. 12.

Ai Weiwei may be China's most famous contemporary artist and a prolific social justice activist. But at his core, Ai insists, he is simply an observer. Not to mention a relentless documenter -- of the Chinese communist government, of international human rights violations, of the 40-some cats that roam his Beijing art studio and of the longtime team members who populate his Berlin art studio, a 150-year-old underground beer cellar. Tonight it's the moon that has captured Ai's attention. He arrived a few hours ago at LAX and now strolls languidly across his agent's Beverly Hills office courtyard, repeatedly stopping to take photos of the sky.

It speaks volumes about the plight of rabble-rousers in China today that Ai Weiwei, the country's most famous dissident artist, has decided that working there is too dangerous -- so he wants to go to Syria. Ai, who received his passport back from Chinese authorities last year, is turning his attention to Syrian refugees. For the artist, who spent 81 days in Chinese detention in 2011 and then was blocked from traveling for four years, it is a way of remaining relevant without landing in jail. Ai reflected on his situation during a trip to New York last month. He said he does not want his 7-year-old son to experience the same difficulties as he did as a child when his father, the acclaimed Chinese poet Ai Qing, was purged after he fell out with former leader Mao Tse-tung and was exiled.

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While 3D artist Moritz Reichartz was creating a virtual rendition of Ai Weiwei's Stools in Mashup Between the Clouds, he was also nearing completion of an automated 3D animation inspired by artificial intelligence. Titled Hands Off [A.I.], Reichartz created the animated video over a year of research and development. In describing the animations as "automated," Reichartz means that no keyframes were used whatsoever for any of the clips--he merely "designed and guided the self-driving movements." In this sense the animated virtual objects and spaces, which are equally surreal, beautiful and alien, are types of A.I. Reichartz considers Hands Off [A.I.] to be an artistic answer to Tim Urban's essay "The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence." The artist says the article gave him "heavy mental vertigo" and might have even scared him.