Imitation by A.I. is not the Sincerest Form of Flattery

“In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Generative AI tools have supercharged a media and stock market frenzy since ChatGPT hit the scene. The general message people are receiving is that these AI bots produce creative material, but the use of the word creative is misleading. These bots, once out of an infancy of being spoon-fed curated datasets and human reinforcement, prowl the internet or other designated hunting grounds, vacuuming up words, images, video, music, and more that humans created. Basically, these bots are mining for patterns and relationships. For example, how often and how closely A is related to B.

Once a bot has “learned” enough, it is finally able to simulate creativity. To do this, they operate at supercomputer speed, recombining atoms of human thought and artistry using probability to predict what the next word in a sentence should be, or the next brushstroke in a painting, or the next note in a musical score. The AI produces each successive element in a sequence in complete isolation and ignorance of what came before and what will come after. The result is believable mimicry of human creativity. This is an oversimplification and generalization of the code mechanics involved. The point is that it is nothing but mechanics, no “thinking” required.

Instead of a mental space, these machines function in a deep void, a nothingness that is almost impossible for people to grasp, especially since these machines are anthropomorphized everywhere. The reality is that AIs function in a sterile state of inorganic existence that is absent all hallmarks of anything capable of thought or creativity. They are not consciously alive and never will be. As a result, they are, by their own nature, devoid of intelligence, intuition, inspiration, imagination, emotions, consciousness, understanding, self-awareness, sentience, and spontaneity. They lack even the most rudimentary understanding of what they are, what they are computing, and what they are outputting. Let alone any understanding whatsoever of the human experience, which is the wellspring of all art.

When the scale of the output is kept small, the quality of what is produced by AI mimicry of creativity is sometimes eerily remarkable and other times not exactly mind-blowing. When compared to what a skilled human can do, let alone a Picasso, a John Lennon, or a Hemingway, these bots fall far short. So perhaps it is premature to raise the specter of concern that these AI tools are pillaging the creative heart of humanity just yet, but that day will come if we encourage it. Though it will come not because of advances in AI as much as retreats of societal standards, appreciation, and expectations for art.

For now, perhaps the real question is why someone would want to read literature “written” by an AI that is mimicking human creativity by outputting a mashup of millions of authors. Reading a novel or essay about human life “written” by a lump of lifeless silicon is the same thing as dating a robot. It misses the entire point of dating or reading, which is forging a connection between two humans.

Why would someone want to listen to music created by an AI that mimics musicians instead of music that has real soul? Why would someone want to gaze into the depths of a painting created by an AI that mimics emotions instead of gazing at a masterpiece created by someone who has loved and lost the greatest love of their life and expressed those emotions in their art?

Consumption of this AI mimicry is like swallowing a placebo for reality. At its essence, the purpose of the arts is to communicate the human experience, what it means to be alive. Creating a lifeless bot that mimics artists is not the sincerest form of flattery, but sincerely missing the point entirely.

It is one thing to create AI prototypes that mimic human creativity or emotions in a lab for the purposes of computer research. It is quite another thing, in the midst of a greedy profit-driven race, to release these bots into the wild, often completely untested for psychological safety or ramifications. Far too many people already perceive no difference between journalistic quality news and the unsubstantiated human-authored ramblings found on social media. What will happen to the truth when these bots start making bespoke believable word salad out of everything for everyone?

Some AI systems, not ChatBots and their ilk, are on their way to becoming invaluable gifts to humanity. These other types of AI tools hold the promise of everything from early cancer detection to assisting in the quest for cures. AI robotics systems that automate complex processes, such as driving a car by deep “learning” from example, will also be vastly beneficial to humanity. These are very different AI models than those that are engineered to mimic human creativity or consciousness.

This blind race to achieve AGI, or rather, AI pseudo-sentience and mimicry of human creativity would be harmless except for three key pitfalls:

One: The fallout from every AI advancement in human mimicry dehumanizes us all that much more.

Two: The use of creativity mimicking AI bots is the same as condoning forgery. All the humans whose art was vacuumed up and predigested to produce this mimicry are victims of a sneak thief in the night. Furthermore, isn’t building a machine that mimics the brush strokes or writing style of an artist theft of their very soul, what makes them human, as well as theft of society’s soul at large?

Three: The use of these thought and creativity mimicking AI bots will dumb us all down until, ultimately, on some great and glorious distant day, we will all have become nothing more than receptacles of computer-generated gibberish and slop. Garbage in, Garbage out.

This dumbing down will likely begin at school and carry on all through life. Students using an AI chatbot to write essays is not the same as moving from slide rules to calculators, as some suggest. Writing an essay requires thinking deeply and working out one’s ideas. It is the very foundation of understanding and the exercise of human intelligence. Comparing chatbots to calculators is nonsensical. Using chatbots to write for us is the elimination of using one’s brain intellectually and creatively. What we do not use, we lose.

Like social media, these AI bots are engineered to seduce us by feeding us ever more of what we want. Worse, they deceive some of us into believing they are intelligent or even superintelligent by exploiting human psychology. We humans are wired to equate speech with intelligence. This relationship used to be true, but no longer, and we have no self-defense against the illusion.

The AI genie is already out of the bottle and coming for us all, but not in the way most sci-fi books and movies portray. There is a philosophical concept that one cannot transcend oneself. Since we are incapable of fully understanding our thinking processes, we are incapable of creating a Frankensteinian computer that can truly think as we do. So there will be no singularity that gives birth to malevolent sentient machines. Instead, we will have something completely different, alien, and no more alive and thinking than a lump of coal or a loaded gun.

Art and consciousness are inexorably intertwined. An inanimate object, a thing lacking consciousness, cannot produce art. Ignoring the deeper questions of the source and nature of consciousness, the fundamental question is whether AI hardware is capable of hosting consciousness. AI is a construct of digital hardware and source code that does not in any way replicate the function of the analog human brain, an organ that is so complex in its analog interconnections, communications, and analog chemical messaging that we have only begun to plumb its mysteries. There are also likely many deeper levels of interconnection and communication that we are currently completely ignorant about.

The marketers of AI would like us to ignore all these inconvenient truths and instead reductionistically believe the human brain is like a digital computer, even though there is no resemblance whatsoever between it and the actual analog organ in our skulls. The only rational conclusion from this extreme disparity is that AI systems are completely incapable of hosting consciousness, no matter how much some AI proponents magically wish and argue otherwise. There is also no solid evidence that consciousness is anything remotely resembling a computer program.

The arts are a fundamental nourishment for any healthy evolving society. In our country, the arts have been under attack for a very long time. We need to avoid another front in this war against the arts. We need AI guardrails. We need AI limited to the level of tools, not cobbled-together would-be Frankensteins. AI should never be used to create forgeries of human creativity or social activities. Without these guardrails, the dreaded AI apocalypse will come, but it will not be some sci-fi Terminator Skynet war of humanity versus machines. It will be the slow drip drip drip loss of our humanity, and once our humanity is diminished enough, so too will our very purpose for living.

References:

https://hbr.org/2018/01/artificial-intelligence-for-the-real-world

https://hbr.org/2022/03/customer-experience-in-the-age-of-ai

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1575/1/012192/pdf

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/10/18/ideal-online-shopping-experiences-require-balancing-automation-with-a-human-touch/?sh=686276ee3003

https://www.entrepreneur.com/science-technology/how-to-use-ai-tools-like-chatgpt-in-your-business/441616

https://www.inc.com/hillel-fuld/5-ways-to-use-chatgpt-in-your-workflow.html

https://www.kungfu.ai/blog-post/we-used-chatgpt-to-figure-out-how-businesses-can-use-chatgpt

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/generative-ai-is-here-how-tools-like-chatgpt-could-change-your-business

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2023/01/27/chatgpt-buzzfeed-ai/11129947002/

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/is-chatgpt-use-of-web-content-fair/477558/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-26/we-asked-chatgpt-to-make-a-market-beating-etf-here-s-the-result