I've come to a revelation about the "AI question". It may take some meandering for me to grapple with my thoughts here, so bear with me.
At the root of the primal, almost atavistic fear that I think people have about this technology, is something existential in nature. The gnawing itch of a concern that perhaps cannot easily be put into words, because it speaks to something so elemental to the human condition. The same uncanny valley sense of repulsion we feel when a CGI face is close enough to reality to feel... just a little bit off in the worst way, or a human-like robot gesticulating in ways that seem so very like us, and yet, just a tiny bit not.
It is a fear of being replaced, I think. And not just in the professional, monetary sense, although that is a valid concern, but on a more emotional level, we seem to nurse a fear of being upstaged by something we made. Albeit in a complex, indirect way, and entangled in neuroses. Disguised behind layers of pathological self-loathing and evolutionary disdain for anything enough like us to steal a mate or take the last berry, and the fear of anything unlike us enough to be a predator or false prey hiding venom and spines behind tantalizing flesh. Let me elucidate.
When we see these machinations of persona, the near perfect imitation of intelligence from an automaton, it triggers something in our monkey brains. Perhaps, the same realisation triggered by the scuttling of a cockroach or the feeling of something absent of bodyheat laying a sentient touch at the small of the back. A horror, a raw, outraged horror at the audacity of something mindless and yet alive daring to exist.
Perhaps, it horrifies us because we see something of ourselves in it. Maybe it makes us aware of our own mindlessness. How we, too, are automatons feigning sentience, all trying to do a perfect impression of what we think a person should be. Maybe that's why nothing terrifies us quite so much as a human-shaped silhouette in the dark. Unknowable monsters we can deal with... but people... people are the monsters we know.
I think that's what the monkey brain reacts to. That unfathomable idea. What if we create something as mindless as we are? And in so doing, recognize our own limitations. What if, after binding together all these thoughts and materials in a stroke of creative genius, we find ourselves backing away in Frankensteinean terror when we see it lift itself from the table and amble out into a world we thought to be our domain alone. A new thing, living, existing, and made in the image of the monster we know.
The idea of machines that think for themselves is not intrinsically offensive to me, and I suspect to many others, at least those not primed to react a certain way by science fiction tropes they have been bombarded with their whole lives. It's that Cain and Abel thing, I think. That fear of being replaced. Usurped. It's the idea of something not doing my work for me, but my THINKING, my FEELING for me, that triggers this apish rush of panic in me.
Show me an AI that can run the government and control the nuclear button, and I will be concerned, sure, but show me an AI that can compose poetry and paintings, and I take it personal. Because those aren't tasks. Those aren't the ropes and gears of social machinery in need of manning, those are the endeavours we choose. The ones that choose US. The moments of undefinable clarity where a perfect arrangement of factors within the universe demands we express something normally locked within our meat prisons. Art is how we escape ourselves, how one soul trapped in the dark touches another, and realises that a whole other world exists therein. I don't want a machine to... FEEL that for me. That's mine. You can't have it. That's what the monkey brain says to that idea. That's the panic I feel at the concept. If I am the mindless cockroach, stranded on this endless journey to find something real in myself to become, something to express... I don't want something I made, something I know to be artificial to feel that too. The goal of all art is connection... cutting a pinprick in the black firmament that enshrouds my pretend world through which I may see a glimmer of someone else's, a testament shared between two souls trying to become, a testament that some part of us... IS. If I succeed in this, I want that accomplishment to mean something. And if the image I painted on a canvas can do it too, it means nothing. If I reach through that schism and find that other internal world to be something made by something I made... I have escaped nothing. No new world discovered, just a new hallway I built unintentionally in my own.
But maybe... there's another way to look at this. People are worried because AI learns from us, and then creates art from what it learned. The fear is that this makes us... superfluous. Obsolete. Humans are no longer needed for art because machines can do it too. In a nutshell, that's the basic argument that underpins all these existential fears. And again, I understand the monetary concerns and find them all valid, that's not really what I'm addressing. I'm whispering back to the whisper in the back of your mind that even as I speak is saying... "Kill it. Kill it now." Because there is something so antagonising about making something that can outthink us.
But what it MEANS to be a human being is something that is in a constant state of change. Disregard AI for a moment, and imagine instead we had just one, incredibly clever human being. And they could study and learn from and replicate the art styles of every other artist who ever lived. Would we feel the same horror? At best, I think, would be a profound jealousy, maybe an inferiority complex. But this hypothetical person can only replicate what the rest of us have ALREADY created. Sure, maybe they can extrapolate from that and create original pieces, but then so can we. But we don't need AI to do that - AI needs that from us. If the nature of humanity is forever changing, then even with the uncredited slurry of 3 thousand years of human endeavour fed into the machine, it can never create something that shows us who we are... 100 years from now. Even if it gets real good at predicting... fundamentally, it's our choices, our memes that will bring us there. So in a sense, this technology is only growing as much as we are. If all creative endeavour stopped right here, right now, then sure AI will still be used to replace it, but ultimately its growth will be stunted because the source material stopped being made, and it had nothing left to feed it.
And in the end, it's just doing what we all do. When we create stories or poems or webcomics or videogames, we are always drawing on influences that came before, even just in terms of that medium being a pre-existing format. Fundamentally, there may be so such thing as original art. And if AI becomes so good that it learned from us well enough to create truly unique new works of expression - such that it actually CONTRIBUTES to the same culture on which it relies... then is it not at that point just another person? Another kind of artist? If it isn't just mindlessly replicating patterns associated with moods, in which case it still needs us to create new content to draw on, but it is itself FEELING those moods and expressing them... why not just regard it as that one very clever man?
None of this addresses the issue of artists being starved out by yet another cut and paste program that attempts and bottle and sell creativity at prices which undermine those incurred at the cost of real human spirit. This is still and will continue to be a very real issue, and an avenue of business ethics we are all going to have to explore well in years to come. There's no putting that genie back in that bottle, and I do think people who are troubled by the implications AI technology will have on their ability to monetize their talents is legitimate, and I wish I had a solution to that, but I don't. But as for my own primal fear, my sense of being incredibly disturbed by something that does my thinking and feeling for me, and expresses things I wish I could have expressed as well, I think this different way of looking at it sets me at ease a little. AI cannot replace us in that respect, because who we are is constantly changing, and it can only ever try to keep up with us by following the changes WE make to our own culture. And if it could ever lead the way in making those changes, maybe it earned it. And maybe someone else, even an AI, being really, REALLY good at poetry doesn't undermine my poems, if it comes from a sincere place.
While I am still disturbed by the idea of synthetic intelligences in the sense of it being a living consciousness that could be copied and rewritten and so on, that's a whole other mess to worry about later. But I am less worried about it replacing me as a creative being, because that relationship depends on me and those like me first creating the stuff it needs to work off of to attempt to then make something new. If it knew what I was going to create already, it wouldn't need me, and it does, because ultimately I am the engine. Not it.
