One morning, about a month ago, one of my students visited me before school with a question. What should I do, he asked, about chatGPT? To which I replied, I don’t know; why do you have to do anything at all? And that’s when he showed me how it wrote an essay for him and that he had submitted that essay as a history assignment.
Wow, was my first response. Then I asked why he did it. Because he wanted to see if it would work, he explained. Would he make an A? Could the teacher tell it wasn’t his? The content created was original and would therefore not set off any alarms in the school’s plagiarism detection program. Should he wait to see what happened or tell her ahead of time?
He ended up telling her before class that day and she was cool about it. She appreciated his honesty (as did I) and for teaching us about what was out there. Because it’s amazing. Somewhat unnerving. Certainly surprising. Even scary, a little bit.
Of course, AI has been part of our lives for a while now. Alexa, Siri, autocorrect (sort of.) WordPress offers SEO optimization tools for text as well headline creation. I love using them. So what’s the big deal about chatGPT? Or deepfake AI?* Or any such tools? Are the cyborgs coming for us, at our own invitation?
In so many ways, I hate asking that. I despise when folks argue about how things are going to get so horrible because of some new invention. It’s a fear as old as time, starting with the printing press and working its way through the assembly line and even the internet itself. Now it’s AI. Do the awful scenarios people dream up ever happen? Well, yeah…people do lose jobs because of new technology. Social media does provide hunting grounds for predators. Deepfake videos and images have truly hurt people and deliberately misled others. But all these technologies also provide real value in our lives, too. So what, if anything, do we do?
According to numerous knowledgeable people, detecting AI created material can be very difficult. We’ve all heard about how it’s been used to create art and pass professional exams. Its own creators and other web specialists know that proving something was AI created is difficult (and becoming more difficult to detect all the time.) But so what, right? If we’re reading an article online, enjoying an engaging video, or losing ourselves in a breathtaking painting, what difference does it make if it’s created by AI as long as it’s good?
That is the question that needles me. There’s nothing to prevent anyone from publishing a story, article, or book that was mostly or entirely composed by an AI text generator (chatGPT is by far not the only one.) Have I already read or run into some of this material? Almost certainly yes. So, was it any good? What would it mean if I never know I’m reading a story or poem that’s AI generated and I really do like it?
The problem is that art—be it music, poetry, literature, visual—is breathtaking because it’s human. At least to me it is. When I hear Beethoven, read W. H. Auden, or gaze at anything by Michelangelo, my soul soars. Not just from the tangible beauty of the material, but also from the jaw-dropping awe that anyone could make something so stunning. If we remove humans from the creation process, what’s left? And more importantly, why is it there at all?
The reason art exists in its many forms is because humans must create. We live, we strive, and most importantly we feel. Leave it to poet e.e. cummings to have the right words to explain it:
A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.
This may sound easy. It isn’t.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel-but that’s thinking or believing or
knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling-not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can
be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a
lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you
everybody else-means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and
never stop fighting
(from “A Poet’s Advice to Students,” italics mine)
Replace poet with artist and poetry with art and there you have it: the exact reason that deepfakes and AI are so inadequate when it comes to the creation of beauty. It’s not that they’re bad at it (although they certainly are, sometimes), it’s that they’re programmed. It’s not that consuming such material couldn’t inspire or strike us with wonder, it’s that such media deletes half the equation of art. The artist.
The whole idea of collecting phrases, images, colors, or notes and sticking them together based on algorithms is not only unappealing, it’s boring. Because simply consuming poetry, literature, music, et. al., is only part of the fun. The other parts are the awe, joy, and inspiration that comes from realizing a mortal human being made it. A person who walks, breathes, and works through the same ups and downs as me. A being who is angry, desperate or awestruck.
Or maybe even just bored or lonely herself, but she takes that cyclone of emotion and builds something from it. Something that others recognize and understand. It can be positive and inspiring; it could be rebellious and mocking, even offensive. But whatever form the art takes, other souls recognize it. They, too, can feel and believe in it. Act on it; hate it; learn from it. Keep coming back to it. Or simply just exist with it.
I don’t want to read just for something to do, I want to learn something, whether it’s about myself or the world around me. I want to see how someone built a particular poem or novel. Same thing with a painting or music or sculpture. Architecture. When such media are done well, they vibrate with the human soul like a tuning fork. Not just because their beauty strikes us, but because they are, in every sense of the word, human. Our poems, symphonies, performance art, theater: they’re not just for us. They are us.
Art, in whatever sublime or clunky form it may take, is an extension of ourselves. It’s not just there to look, sound, or feel good. It’s there because we need it to be; just like we need food, clothing, and shelter. Outsourcing our life force to AI is probably doable in that, at some point, it will become really good. Even better than it is now. But it will never compose or paint or build something because it wants to. It will never look at what it’s created and know that it works, whether it’s controversial or engaging, beautiful or shocking. It won’t know if it’s good or that it matters.
Nope. AI doesn’t have the guts to do that.