When does a work of art cease to be a work of art? When it is made by a machine?
Until recently, this was largely an academic question. Society was not horrified by the possibility that photography would destroy the art of painting. Film theorists calmly observed that the movie camera was its own agent in the filmmaking process, recording and “noticing” things that even the director and cinematographer would not have noticed at the time of shooting. But because the camera does not script, act, edit, color correct, etc., no one worried that machine-made films would compete with or surpass films made by ordinary humans.
The anguished debate over whether AI art is an oxymoron reveals, consciously or not, what it is trying to conceal: the profound personal and societal anguish over the consequences of our individual and collective spiritual retreat from making art as beings created by God with soul and body who must prepare for both death on earth and eternal life by God's will.
Now, with Hollywood staff on historic furlough and studios and talent struggling to survive the streaming revolution, we seem to be in a much different situation. people The theme of digital transformation of arts and entertainment has even made its way into The New Yorker, which late last month published an in-depth essay on the subject by science fiction writer Ted Chiang.
The crux of Chiang's argument for “why AI won't produce art” is that we are each unique, and therefore our human uniqueness, when applied to the demands of making the many choices required in an artistic endeavor, creates a freshness and novelty that no machine-induced uniqueness can achieve.
“What you create doesn't have to be completely different from every work of art in the history of humanity to be valuable,” he concludes. “The fact that you're telling it, that it comes from your unique life experience and reaches a specific moment in the life of the person who sees your work, is what makes it new. We are all products of what happened before us, but it's by living our lives in engagement with others that we bring meaning to the world. That's something no autocomplete algorithm can ever do, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.”
Hard to argue! But Chiang Kai-shek's logic is a little too vague to withstand the increasing pressure of the theoretically infinite images our giant computers generate.
First, the good: Chang is right to emphasize the importance of the relationship between artist and audience in defining the meaning and purpose of art. To cite one key example, he is spot on when he asserts that “the importance of a child's fan letter comes not from its eloquence, but from its sincerity, both for the child who writes it and for the athlete who receives it.”
And, crucially, our familiarity with language makes us “prey to imitation” by computational models that have been extensively trained on our language, that is, we succumb to the diabolical temptation of the so-called “Turing test,” which holds that superintelligence is defined by the ability to appear superintelligent. Saying that computers are really smart is “Princess Bride”-level stupidity if it can fool us into thinking that they are.
But today we live under the cultural and psychological dominance of people who truly believe that an imitation of something is better than the lack of the thing itself. This thinking leads people to believe that, to quote an old U2 hit, an imitation is “better than the real thing” because the real thing is hard, the real thing is expensive, the real thing is fragile, the real thing is fleeting, the real thing starts fights, the real thing is hard to live with. limit With us request, Simulations may do none of these things, or none at all, or much less. Think of the way virtual or artificial sex is presented socially as a great advancement from reality. Our shared human world is increasingly being divided in this way, sold for parts, with reality being exchanged for the virtual, the simulated, or outright fake. The virtual has become the height of virtue.
Chiang's defense of the human arts falters in the face of virtualization, reverting to a kind of self-righteous sentimentalism: he wants to argue that humans are essentially good, but the evidence he gathers is elusive, appealing instead to a selfish desire to feel sympathy, cuteness, pity, even meaning. Here, nevertheless, appears his evasion.
Listen to the great Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky's candid response to the question of art and its legitimacy: “The role of art is not, as is often thought, to convey ideas, to spread ideas or to set an example. Its purpose is to prepare man for death, to cultivate and polish his soul so that he can turn it to good. When a person is moved by a masterpiece, he begins to hear within himself the same call of truth that prompted the artist to create.” On the surface, it sounds very similar to what Chiang Kai-shek was trying to say. But how deep is the meaning?
Why? Because Tarkovsky understood that even purely human art, without robots, algorithms or code, would be futile and meaningless without religion. “An artist without faith is like a painter born blind,” he wrote. “Only faith can link together the system of images that constitutes the very “system of life.” “The meaning of religious truth is HopeFor Tarkovsky, art is a test of suffering and joy, a joint creation of the desired details of each other's lives by artist and spectator: here we find our uniqueness and unity, and not in the fact that this or that collection of events, this or that mess, this or that story unfolds in this or that person's life and not in another.
The bitter debate over whether AI art is an oxymoron reveals what it is trying to hide, consciously or not: the great personal and social anguish over the consequences of retreating, individually and collectively, from spiritual art-making as beings created by God with soul and body and who must prepare for both earthly death and, God willing, eternal life. This retreat leaves a heart-shaped hole into which infinite tricks and simulations may flow, but which even infinity cannot fill. The immediate question is not whether machines will one day simulate souls and cleverly fool us, but whether we exercise real souls today, without which real art will elude us forever.
