“I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source, you will find the answer to the question of whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and find everything in himself and in Nature to whom he has attached himself.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
Humans are not the fastest or strongest animals. In fact, we are not even the only ones who use tools, communicate, and have culture or self-awareness. Though we don't know exactly what caused our brains to grow as large as they are today, we seem to owe our complex reasoning abilities to it.
Ever since we learned to write, we have documented how special we are. Aristotle marked our differences over 2,000 years ago. We are "rational animals" pursuing knowledge for its own sake - we live by art and reasoning, he wrote. A lot of what he said still stands. Yes, we see the roots of many behaviors once considered uniquely human in our closest relatives, chimpanzees, and bonobos. We also observe similar behaviors in more distant relatives such as whales and dolphins. But we are the only ones who peer into their world and write books about it.
Our ancestors were surrounded by other human species. What separated us was that we started to produce superior cultural and technological artifacts. More importantly, we started to assign symbolic values to objects such as geometrical designs on plaques and cave art.
By contrast, there is not much evidence that any other hominids were capable of any kind of art. Neanderthals have been suspected as possible makers of art caves in Europe, which was hailed as proof they had similar levels of abstract thought. However, there is no certain proof and some question whether Neanderthals made it at all. And even so, the symbols made by H. sapiens are clearly more abundant and advanced.
But how did we start making symbols?
Somehow, our language-learning abilities were gradually "switched on", anthropologists argue. Our mental tools for complex language were in place before we developed them, just as early birds (a.k.a dinosaurs) developed feathers before they could fly.
We started with language-like symbols as a way to represent the world around us. We first have to create a symbolic representation of a word in our brain before we can speak it. These mental symbols eventually led to language in all its complexity and the ability to process information is the main reason we won over other human species.
It's not clear exactly when speech evolved, or how. But it seems likely that it was partly driven by another uniquely human trait: our superior social skills. That led us to be able to cooperate even more and create the world we have today. We are what we are because of our unique ability to imagine symbols, (re)create those symbols for communication, and strengthen social connections through it.
Only with culture (the passing on of knowledge) and our amazing signaling and social skills could we learn to develop the machines we have today. Developed over centuries and centuries of accumulated knowledge.
Art and humanity are intrinsically connected.
Music, drawing, sculpting, writing… It has been with us for millennia and has been essential for us. The necessity of being in a group and the importance of dancing to a beat, for instance, have always been a part of our society. Because of it, we engage in behaviors without even thinking about them including mimicking someone we are talking to or walking in the same rhythm as the people we are with.
We create art to make the world prettier, to connect with others, and to better understand ourselves. The commodification of art means that it is no longer about the creator, but rather about how to create value or capital. And that's also OK. Artists deserve to be praised and paid. The problem is that we are now handing art-making over to machines. Hence, we are not interested in the intrinsic value of creating art for our own growth and connection. By leaving the creation to machines, only the end result matters the ability to create money.
AI is the final step in commodifying something intrinsically human and of priceless value to our psyches. So, as a society, we prefer bland texts (photographs/images/videos) generated by machines to those that are truly the result of human insight, experience, and knowledge.
I'm not a purist. I realize that AI can help us with a variety of annoying tasks. Not only that, it has been with us for a while in extremely useful tools such as Google maps and Grammarly. No one would want to go back to a world without navigation apps, and a simple editing tool like Grammarly is fundamental, especially for a non-native English speaker like me.
This new explosion of AI tools has also made me curious and I have been exploring and testing some AI apps, just like everyone else. There are some incredible ones that can help you with some repetitive and annoying tasks, such as easily editing your texts, video, and audio.
What scares me is the future. Incredible amounts of money and resources are being poured into AI without any protection policies or serious discussions in politics around how to ensure AI development is positive for society. Just like we did with social media, we are kicking the problem to a future where it may be impossible to turn back.
Where will this lead us? Certainly, it is scary to imagine AI progressing to a point where we cannot distinguish between images or texts generated with it and those not. Why hire an artist to create anything when you can make it yourself?
AI has been particularly harmful to designers, in my opinion. The images used to develop the AIs came from thousands of artists who were unaware of their use. They now have to compete with this technology which will only get better and better. The only way they could promote their work, which was by showing off their images on social media, has been turned against them. I wonder how upcoming artists will go about it. How can they get clients if they can't put their art online with the risk of it being scraped and used by AI?
And what does the fact that you can create a beautiful image with a few clicks teach us? How many people will be discouraged from ever attempting to draw or create something because it is much easier to do with AI? Why spend years and years perfecting techniques when you can achieve the same results with a few clicks? Especially problematic, due to the sweat, tears, and many hours of work of artists.
But drawing and painting are not only about getting a good result or having it flawless. It's about facing a white canvas and putting your ideas and feelings there. About creating. About expression. There is an intrinsic need to create and express ourselves through art.
The musician, Nick Cave wrote after being presented with music composed by ChatGPT with the prompt: "Write a song in the style of Nick Cave”
“Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognises as their known self.
This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering.”
My main conflict with the idea of AI, other than copyright and the real threat of artificial intelligence outsmarting us, is just how sad it all is. How depressing is the thought that we want to surrender one of the key aspects of what makes us humans to machines? That we don’t want to learn, practice, or get competent at something?
As if we don't want the feeling of facing our own mortality and our vulnerability that comes from staring at a white canvas. As if the only thing that matters is the final results and what can be earned from them. Artificial intelligence robs us of some of our humanity. We have spent thousands of years trying to communicate and understand the world around us and ourselves through art and we should not give it up.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick)
From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, science fiction authors have explored the human/tech question directly: what will happen to humanity if we can create beings in our own image? In his science fiction, Philip K. Dick mostly pondered identity, life, and reality. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is one of Dick's most iconic novels. Perhaps better known as the book that inspired Blade Runner. Rick Deckard, the protagonist of both the book and the film, is an expert at identifying and retiring artificial humans called androids.
Wall-E (2008). I was going to suggest the new Pinnochio from Guillermo del Toro, but actually, the movie that makes more sense here is Wall-E. A dystopian future where the planet Earth has been destroyed and humanity is controlled by an all-powerful AI, while stuck in comfortable chairs looking at our screens. Also, cute robots <3
The One. Not directly connected with AI, but in a somewhat dystopian future where humans are matched by DNA tests done by a tech company. It explores through multiple characters what this “technological advancement” would mean to us, while also showing how unscrupulous tech CEOs can be. This was one of the first TV shows that opened this door and led to many real-life stories such as We Crash and The Dropout being produced.
Yes, I think it behooves anyone who writes publicly to use spelling- and grammar-checking tools, if only to catch the witless typos and other errors we’re all prone to, no matter our language proficiency.
Ironically, though, to utilize these tools most effectively, you almost have to be a grammarian or language expert to be confident enough to occasionally reject their suggestions. For example, if you write “twice as long as,” Word’s grammar checker suggests replacing “as long as” with “if,” reducing the sentence to nonsense. And everyone has seen inappropriate spelling suggestions (like the joke: A priest, a minister and a rabbit walk in to a bar. The bartender wonders: “A rabbit?” The rabbit shrugs: “Auto-correct.”).
In Dick’s book, androids (called replicants in the movie) are short on empathy, but they do appear to have good language proficiency. For some reason I’m kind of indifferent to the idea of robots writing, say, free verse poetry. There’s an enormous surplus of poetry being written now. Not sure a little more would make that much of a difference. Robots that read poetry would be nice, though, since there is a shortage these days of poetry readers.
As I saw on Twitter: everyone wants to write with AI, but no one wants to read texts done by AI :)