Inhuman, All Too Inhuman

Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

(Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich, 1818. Source: Public Domain)

“What is called life does not consist in eating, drinking, procreating, and so forth; rather, it consists in Dionysian festivals and in the creative production of works of art.”

~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

A lot has been said and written of late regarding our Artificial Intelligence (AI) Overlords and their potential to disrupt human affairs. Herewith, some more grist for the mill...

Depending on your take, you might see innovations in the field – like OpenAI, the parent company behind ChatGPT – as a threat... or an ally. AI enthusiasts assure us that whole industries are set to be disrupted... layers of the workforce dis-intermediated... and payrolls decimated. 

Maybe. Maybe not. 

In any case, we are not much concerned with such economic matters in this space. Money, markets, mobs and manias... no doubt you get plenty of that elsewhere. 

But what about art? What about that most human of endeavors, which Nietzsche (in The Birth of Tragedy) called the “highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life”?

It has been posited that AI programs – which can already turn your grocery list into a Shakespearean sonnet in seconds, morph your brunch time selfie into a Singer Sargent-style portrait and score your latest unboxing video with all the emotion that you wished was there in the first place – will eventually come to replace poets, painters, composers and other mere humans. 

For one thing, AI is cheaper (and therefore more efficient) than people. Machines don’t take breaks or demand raises. Meanwhile, even starving artists have to eat... sometimes. AI is also reliable, more so even than well-fed artists. And unlike moody artists up and down the food chain, AI is predictable; able to replicate works on demand with precision, exactly as instructed. 

All true. And plenty more besides. 

But let us pause for a moment and engage in that marvelous, decidedly human pastime, which for the moment lies beyond the reach of machines; let us… think.

That is, let us, as (sometimes painfully) self-aware creatures, cogitate on the nature of art itself. What is its purpose? Why do we undertake such an activity, engaging as we do our most finite resource (time) in its pursuit? 

We might begin by “painting the negative,” as the impressionists would say; by examining what art is not. And lo, what spry adjectives leap promptly to mind! Words like...

Efficient... Reliable... Predictable... 

To the extent that “art” earns any of these labels, it degrades not only in the eye of the beholder (a secondary consideration, to be sure), but also in the soul of the artist himself. For not only must we consider the “product,” to put it in crude, reductionist terms, but more importantly the producer.

In other words, we do not engage in art – real, fine art – in order that we might paint a faster portrait or compose a more technically perfect melody. We create in order to engage with the process itself, to imbue it with our own pain and suffering and exultation, to wrestle with our inner demons and to confront our very nature, human, all too human as it is. 

It is not only the answers we seek (but never fully realize) that concern us, but the questions we pose, of and to ourselves, along the journey. Zarathustra as Wanderer, in other words; not enlightened Buddha... nor anti-social AI. (Telos ≠ terminus)

Gustave Flaubert famously took years to write Madame Bovary, often agonizing for weeks on end to find “le mot juste.” His was a kind of incurable, all too human perfectionism, which stifled the quantity of his output at a time when his contemporaries were churning out volumes, leading the British essayist and critic, Walter Pater, to dub the Frenchman the “martyr of style.”

And yet, Flaubert’s masterwork was completed not a second too soon. What wretched philistine would begrudge the artist a single agonizing moment at his desk, the midnight oil taunting him to plumb further the depths of his very soul? What vulgarian would curb his course, lighten his load, curtail his quest? 

Only an artificial intelligence, inhuman and inhumane, a mere machine, could perform such a savagely thoughtless act. While algorithms flood the material world with anti-art – efficiently, reliably, predictably – artists, so liberated, so differentiated, will ascend to greater heights, hitherto unseen, unknown, unimagined. 

“The great end of art,” Nietzsche reminds us, “is to strike the imagination with the power of a soul that refuses to admit defeat even in the midst of a collapsing world.”

Regards,

Joel Bowman
Buenos Aires, Argentina ~ February 1, 2023