There’s more to manifesting, here’s its philosophical backstory
Beyond the so-called sensible, a hidden strand of Western spiritual thought reemerges.
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Essay
AI
Culture
14 min read
AI confronts the creative.
Daniel Kim.
Some of you are going to hate this article.
I want to start off by saying that a human wrote this article.
That’s an important caveat nowadays because every month there’s yet another AI churning out music, images, videos, and essays that could go toe-to-toe with most humans in quality and originality. Making the news in the last few months has been the remarkable Chat GPT3 from OpenAI. A chatbot on steroids, Chat GPT3 is trained to produce conversational and competent language. You can ask it to write a children’s story, a trigonometry lesson plan, a 2-year strategy for a startup or even an inspiring Christmas sermon written in the style of a World War II speech. Here’s the thing… it won’t just do a ‘passable’ job, but it will do a pretty damn good job.
Now, I am painfully aware that ‘AI vs human creativity’ is a topic more worn out than a marathon runner’s shorts - I certainly don’t want to unnecessarily add to the 117 million search results for ‘AI and creativity’. It’s the sensation of our decade with equally sensational headlines, like Elon Musk saying that the use of AI is like “summoning a demon”. There are quite literally tens of thousands of articles about whether AI will surpass and replace us or whether they are simply another tool in our techno-creative arsenal. And rightly so! There are important discussions to be had about the economic implications in the creative industry as it increasingly looks as though junior copywriter and art director jobs could be fully automated. There are also pertinent legal questions being asked by the artists whose blood, sweat and carpel-tunnel syndrome have been scraped from massive public image databases to train these AI, rendering their hard-won technical skill into an effortless toy for the masses with no recognition or recompense. People far more qualified and more intelligent than me have written on these topics
'There’s a moment of confrontation that challenges our notion of human superiority over the machines.'
However, there’s one particular feeling that I don’t think has been addressed as much. It’s the feeling of ‘uncomfortable ickiness or angst many of us experience when confronted by these AI. Almost every person I’ve shown Chat GPT3 to have gawped at it - almost as if they couldn’t believe how good it really was. There’s a moment of confrontation that challenges our notion of human superiority over the machines. I certainly felt this even as the techno-optimist that I am. Playing with Chat GPT3 did something to me as a writer. My first reaction was, “Flip… I need to up my game”. My second reaction was the disquiet realisation that everything I thought was unique to human creative writing - rhetoric, rhyme and rhythm - were in fact sophisticated patterns that could be reproduced and even re-imagined by a soulless computer.
What’s interesting about this reaction is that we’re generally fine with computers being better than us. Computer vs Human is not a new debate. After the world chess champion Kasparov “lost his fighting spirit” in 1997 against IBM’s’s Deep Blue Chess computer, it’s become an uncontested fact that humans will never beat a computer at chess. A quarter of a century later, it’s not uncommon to hear professional players or commentators saying ‘run it through the engine’, when they want to analyse the latest world-championship game. Despite this status quo, very few of us feel profoundly threatened by this. Nothing about the fact that a computer can do mass-calculations and pattern recognition better than humans feels threatening. That’s just what a computer is - a brute-force machine.
'Rarely have new technologies caused existential anxiety about our human value.'
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But when it comes to poetry, music, creative writing, design, imagery, composition, originality; nothing can replace that unique human spark! We desperately fight to maintain human superiority. Artist Steven Zapata critiques AI tools like Chat GPT3 saying that their creative offerings are ‘bland and mediocre’ devoid of originality and zest. That may be true, but if we’re really honest with ourselves, and spend enough time scrolling Instagram, most of our human offerings turn out to be bland and mediocre devoid of originality and zest. New technologies have always created anxiety about job security and unforeseen negative social consequences. Rarely have new technologies caused existential anxiety about our human value.
For many of us, we intuitively feel that creativity and artistic expression are some of the most unique and sacred of human faculties. We probably couldn’t give a rational reason for it, but we feel it to be true. Here’s the thing though, there’s a reason why we feel this way. Our convictions about what makes humanity unique and valuable are not universal intuitions. They are shaped by our social and historic location.
Throughout history, we’ve always tried to identify what makes us so special as humans, and in that pursuit, we’ve held different traits as sacrosanct. For a long time, it was the capacity to Reason - our rational mind. That’s Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas for you - the bedrock thinkers of the classical and medieval Western world. In his Summa Theological, Aquinas wrote that ‘the human species is distinguished from all others by the fact that man alone has reason’. This reign of Reason continued as the status quo reaching its pinnacle in the 18th century with the so-called Enlightenment. This was when Descartes identified our ‘thinking’ as the core our humanity existence - “I think therefore I am”. The elevation of Reason even got slightly out of hand. Following the French Revolution in 1789, the revolutionary government even set up the ‘cult of Reason’ and converted churches into temples where the teenage daughters of rich patricians were worshipped as goddesses of Reason. The 1790s were a weird time in France.
'2023’s sensibilities are not with the Enlightenment Rationalists, instead, I’d argue that we are more in line with the Romantics.'
We look back at this period of hyper-Reason and scoff. Silly us forever thinking that our Reason gave us ultimate value. What an archaic idea! We certainly don’t think or feel that problem-solving, logic, and reasoning is integral to our humanity. In fact, we can farm those out to computers now and really get to work in expressing our humanity in more meaningful ways. We no longer live in the Age of Reason, and we haven’t done for quite some time. In fact, 2023’s sensibilities are not with the Enlightenment Rationalists, instead, I’d argue that we are more in line with the Romantics.
In the 19th century, whilst the Age of Reason was still trundling on, there was a community of thinkers reacting against the spirit of the age - these were the Romantics. The Romantics looked at the Modern world and were disgusted by the banal capitalist industrialism of it all. They lamented the loss of beauty in the world and a sense of spiritual unity. The Romantics described the people of their time as being ‘triply divided’ by ‘three alienations’. The first was within the individual between our thinking and our feeling being at odds with each other. Second was between the individual and other people due to the decline of traditional communities and the rise of the capitalist marketplace. Third was between the individual and Nature due to the rise of modern technology turning the natural world into something to be mastered rather than something we are a part of. We had lost who we were and needed to go on a journey to discover who we truly are. Sound familiar?
The Romantics understood that the one thing that had previously remedied these alienations was the Christian religion and its God. A benevolent creator who provided morality, meaning, and value to the individual and her society. But ultimately, the Romantics were still people of their time and assumed that religion was on its way out and was an ancient superstitious system that needed to be done away with. And so the Romantics had to find something else to hang everything on, a new centre of ultimate meaning. Religion is out, Reason was too narrow. What we need is a way for the individual to integrate and express the whole of their identity. Set the stage for the enthronement of Creativity.
The sociologist Charles Taylor calls this the birth of the ‘Age of Authenticity’, where the most important task for the individual is to discover and express her most authentic self. In this way, artistic creation became an integral way in which a person could come to define themselves. So Schlegel, a 18th century Romantic, was fond of saying that the individual should make ‘his life into a novel, a beautiful whole’ aiming for 'the ideal of self-realisation and beauty’. This vision was so compelling that it spread outside Romantic circles. So 100 years later, the not-so-Romantic Nietzsche said that the most important task of the individual was to ‘give style to one’s character’. To make sense of all the incoherent combination of loves, desires, hatreds, and motives in our heart and make something beautiful out of it.
Since then, we’ve continued to elevate the role of Creative expression as an essential part of our human identity. Taylor made this observation: 'The artist [has become] the paradigm case of the human being, as an agent of original self-definition. Since about 1800, there has been a tendency to heroise the artist, to see his or her life as the essence of the human condition, and to venerate him or her as a seer, the creator of cultural values.'
'There is a magic to creative self-expression - it’s joyful, it’s play, it’s thrilling.'
He’s absolutely right. The heroes of our time are not kings or queens, nor war generals or religious messiahs. The heroes of our time are the Bob Dylans, the Virginia Woolfs, the Picassos, Beyoncés, the Jacob Colliers - the Artists. Our heroes reveal our aspirations. Today, the artist has become for us the “very paragon of humanity” and has taken on a pseudo-messianic role in Western culture. People who show us what we could be. They are the luminaries who have expressed the whole of their authentic self in a way that is beautiful and understood by other people. Those people who stood against cookie-cutter convention and carved a unique way of being themselves in a disenchanted world. Don’t we also want this? Isn’t this the longing of our hearts as 21st century individuals? Don’t we want to be understood and to create something with our lives? Don’t we want to self-actualise? It’s certainly a sticky idea and there’s good reason for it. There is a magic to creative self-expression - it’s joyful, it’s play, it’s thrilling when you make something out of nothing, and that thrill is even more electrifying when you take the terrifying step of sharing it with someone and they understand it. You feel known in a way that’s different to someone reading your CV or even having a conversation. 'I create therefore I am’ is the new dogma of the day.
This is why I think we find Chat GPT3, or other art generating AI like Dall-E or Midjourney, so icky and disconcerting. It’s hard to shake a deep conviction that has been encoded into us through 200 years of cultural indoctrination. We’re okay with AI and computers encroaching on technical tasks and labour efficiencies. We can even just about live with the fact that technology might make huge swathes of people jobless. But God forbid that the machines devalue or take away the ability of creative self-expression! That’s ours, we need it, it’s our source of ultimate meaning and human joy. I just don’t want to face the fact that a soulless, unloving, unsuffering machine can spit out something more compelling, emotive, and eloquent than most of us ever could. This is felt keenly by the creative community. Amidst the very serious economic and legal questions about being made redundant, or their work being sucked into the algorithm, there is an angst that taps into a deep belief about what makes our humanity beautiful and valuable.
Here’s Zapata again.
“This is art making, for God’s sake, not some agitating manual process people hate. This is one of the things people enjoy doing… We should reserve art making for those who stand to gain something from it, for whom it can bring joy and reward, rather than dumbly bestow it on an unfeeling non-being”
A YouTube comment under a video about the hopelessness many creatives feel in the face of these AI express it thus.
“I feel like we forget that expression, emotion is what makes us uniquely human, and when we deprive ourselves [of them] we’re just hollow… . I’m more or less saying that if there are no outlets that enable expression, then things WILL likely get darker within ourselves”
Finally, here's Hayao Miyazaki, one of the most inspired and celebrated filmmakers in the last century with his work at Studio Ghibli. In a 2016 documentary he unequivocally called AI art an “insult to life itself” saying:
“I feel like we nearing the end of the times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves”.
If you resonate with these statements, you’re probably a 21st Century Romantic. I certainly feel like one. We have elevated Creativity and artistic self-expression to a high pinnacle on which our hopes and fulfillments hang on. We have enthroned Creativity as the thing what constitutes the most essential and important part of our humanity. We thought it was the one thing that couldn’t be taken from us. Perhaps these AIs are forcing us to face the music that our dependence on Creativity as a source of ultimate value may be just as fragile as our dependence on Reason.
'Maybe it’s no bad thing for humans to lose faith in ourselves once in a while.'
Here’s a controversial and very unpopular statement - maybe it’s no bad thing for humans to lose faith in ourselves once in a while. It can be helpful for us to be confronted by our weakness and experience a sense of lack. It shows us that perhaps the foundations we’ve been standing on are not as solid as we presumed them to be and motivates us to go on a journey to discover something more solid. When push comes to shove, I would certainly rather have someone to point out to me that I’m standing on shaky ground than live in blissful ignorance.
Reason was thoroughly dethroned as the centre of human experience. That has been a very good thing because it meant that we now take the heart more seriously. It’s also revealed the ways in which we have devalued and marginalised those with lower cognitive ability. By dethroning Reason, we’ve become more reflective about what makes us special and valuable. We put Reason in its proper place, as an important, beautiful, yet ultimately non-essential part of living a fulfilled life on planet Earth. We came to a better, fuller, and more inclusive understanding of human value.
For the same reasons, maybe it’s high time Creativity needs a good dethroning. Your fulfilment and value does not lie in what you have written, sung, painted, or drawn. Your authentic and unique self is not intrinsically tied to how well you can express yourself. Your creative hobby does not need to be the thing that makes your life feel worthwhile. Artists, like scientists, are beautiful gifts to our society. They reveal insights about our universe and our psyche, providing beauty and meaning to what can feel like a very banal existence. But let’s not fall into the trap of elevating them as pseudo-messianic figures - dangerous things can happen when we hang our hopes and dreams on a certain class of humans.
I don’t think this will have a thawing effect on our creative industry. Dethroning Reason certainly didn’t slow scientific research, I certainly don’t think putting Creativity in its proper place will slow down our innate desire to create and express ourselves.
The idea of ‘dethroning Creativity’ will sound utterly impossible or even immoral to some. I get that. Ultimately, we are products of our times, and it might be the case that we can no sooner dethrone Creativity than imagine a world without electricity. We can’t imagine a sense of self without putting this premium on Creative self-expression. We can’t un-essentialise it. However, I certainly think that being aware of the historic forces that led us to become the people we are is a useful step towards a better understanding of ourselves.
In Christian Theology, the ultimate source of human value is the concept of Imago Dei - The idea that every human is created in the ‘Image of God’. There have been times in history when Theologians have also made the mistake of trying to tie certain traits like Reason and Creativity to the ‘Imago Dei’ - making our value contingent on things that we do. That was a mistake because the most beautiful thing about the concept of Imago Dei is that there is nothing we can do or be or become that will diminish our value before God. Our level of Reason or Creativity cannot add or take away anything from our worth to God or make us any less ourselves. That’s something that I’d be more willing to hang everything on.
I promised a human wrote this article. Well, let me end with a sonnet written by Chat GPT3.
Prompt: Write me a sonnet about dethroning creativity and the need for the 21st century to find a better foundation for human value.
In this age of technology and speed,
Creativity’s throne is overthrown, it seems.
For value, we no longer plant a seed
But rather chase the fleeting and extreme.
We worship at the altar of the new
And scorn the wisdom of the ages past,
Forgetting that it is roots that make us true
and not the leaves that fade and never last.
But as the world keeps changing and evolving,
Perhaps its time to find a firmer ground
To build upon and find a way of solving,
the problems that today’s world has found.
For though creativity has its place,
It cannot be the only source of grace.
