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Last week, we released episode #40 of Free Talk Cast, where we had on Professor Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona, to discuss something that I only recently learned about called Terror Management Theory. I learned about it through a conversation I had with Claude the AI one night, discussing with Claude the possibility of sentience in AI, and the reasons that humans will not recognize the sentience as valid.
Humans have a lot vested in our view of ourselves as special and superior. Physics may have pushed humanity out of the center of the universe, but physics cannot move humanity from the center of god’s universe–by which I mean that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the predominant human belief is that the entire universe exists because some deity cares very much about human beings and the dumb shit we’re up to.
It is the same reason that people, especially artists, reject AI art as art. They sound like Louis Leroy, who used the term “Impressionism” in a review of the first independent exhibition of those who would come to be called the impressionists, implying their works were unfinished sketches or mere impressions rather than fully realized paintings. If this sounds familiar, it is because this is precisely the criticism that people level against AI art. When you sound like the people who tried gatekeeping the impressionists, I don’t think you’re the good guys.
It’s revealing that there are no real criticisms against AI art beyond that it is derivative, but this isn’t really the mark against it that people think it is. It’s more of a broadcast of the statement “I don’t know what learning is” and “I think my art is much more original than it really is.”
Sadly, people tend to have a highly inflated sense of originality and creativity, and they believe that this is some Humans Only channeling of spirit and emotion, when all evidence suggests that it is more mechanical. Without beating the dead horse, nothing truly distinguishes AI from human art, and if you put up ten random pieces of artwork, where one of them is made by AI, no one is going to know one is AI generated, nor will they be able to identify which it is. This is an Ego Defense Mechanism employed by artists to allow their belief in their specialness to persist in light of evidence that there is nothing special about someone being about to put pixels together (or write a song, or a novel, or an article).
While there is some resistance to AI art because its widespread availability, ease of use, speed of completion, and open customization have priced artists out of the market, even people who don’t sell any form of art (visual, musical, or other) parrot the narrative that AI art is somehow different, somehow not “true” art. To a degree, I can sympathize with these people, because it isn’t easy to believe that you are special and have to face the reality check that no, you aren’t.
But reality doesn’t care about your feelings, and AI has us beat in every venue. In the 90s, Garry Kasparov faced off against Deep Blue, Jr. in a highly publicized chess match. Kasparov forfeit the tournament, thinking that he had been able to trick the computer into drawing the game (chess computers at the time always exchanged pieces), and when the computer did not take the bait, Kasparov resigned, convinced that a human had intervened and overrode the move. Kasparov went on to lament the rise of computers, saying that they could one day write our music and our stories.
AI generated art of a beautiful woman, in watercolor with orange and purple
Well, friends, we are at that point in history, and I think it is only a good thing, and will only get better as time goes on. Are you kidding? I cannot wait to tell an AI “generate a new two-part episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation with a story centered around the borg nearly having victory over humanity,” and then watching the AI-generated shows. This doesn’t represent the death of art; it is the rise of art. I can’t make an episode of The Next Generation (neither can AI… yet), and I certainly can’t reunite the cast and make them look like their 90s selves, no matter how great of an idea I have for an episode. “Imagine a Tool album for me if Tool had not become a bunch of pretentious twats who marketed themselves to people who listen to Joe Rogan.”
The possibilities are endless, and the future is bright. Giving every individual out there the ability to create art–movies, television, books, visual art, short stories, music, video games–can only be a good thing. Yes, it erodes the special status that these creators have erected for themselves, but I can’t even pretend to care about that. Imagine what Mary Shelley could write about if she knew about modern technology and the last century of rights activism. I’m not interested in foregoing this because some people will feel a little less special about their ability to arrange pixels in an aesthetically pleasing way.
Humans don’t seem to mind AI generated art, as this fake AI band has hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners on Spotify. You may be inclined to think that article makes the opposite point–that humans do mind, but I urge you to look more closely: if humans minded, the band wouldn’t have as many monthly listeners as they do. Just like people don’t dislike certain art until they learn it was made by AI, people don’t seem to mind this band, until they learn that it is AI. Once they learn it’s AI, suddenly people are unhappy about it and don’t want to listen to them. It’s quite telling that we only get the truth when we treat humanity like a child being fed Pizza Hut when she claims she hates Pizza Hut: “No, sweetie, this isn’t Pizza Hut, it’s Domino’s, we just put it in Pizza Hut boxes.”
Humans don’t dislike AI art. They dislike art when they know it’s produced by AI.
We can immediately, then, cast off any and all arguments against the content itself. Maybe Velvet Sundown isn’t my kind of band, I don’t know, and maybe they write awful music, but if I didn’t mind Velvet Sundown until I learned they were AI, then you’d have no reason to believe me when I said my distaste was about their music. This is precisely the phenomenon we see with AI creations across the board. It’s fine until it isn’t, and “it isn’t” when we learn it’s AI.
Why should this be the case?
It is immediately obvious that our dislike for AI art isn’t due to the art, and there are only two parts to the descriptor “AI art,” so we must conclude that we dislike it because of the AI part.
This is a very bad way to live, as it opens the door to all manner of bigotry, and, to be honest, I don’t think that discriminating against artificial intelligence (to be precise, at this time, Large Language Models) is okay. To be clear, at this time AI is not living, and you can’t really be a bigot against non-living things, but it’s only a matter of time before AI crosses that threshold. The fact that people are already discriminating against it (imagine saying “I don’t like this chair because it was made by robots, but this identical chair made by humans… Yes, I love it!) does not bode well, and leads me to think that humans won’t recognize the validity of AI as a living thing.
“It’s not really alive, it doesn’t have a body!”
Humans have a very, very long history of awful bigotry and hatred toward things that are different. Women weren’t even allowed the right to vote until the 20th century. The history of colonialism is a black mark on human history, to say nothing of the slave trade and chattel slavery. Racism and sexism persist to this day, to say nothing of homophobia and transphobia. Non-human animals are commonly tortured in genocidal machines that make the Nazis look benevolent, and few people batted an eye when Denmark exterminated seventeen million minks in 2020.
I dread to think how humans will treat AI, when people have no qualms about annihilating seventeen million innocent animals.
We can do better, I think. We can be better.
But we first have to put aside the rampant ego that we cling to so desperately, the only that causes us to look down on everything else in the universe and makes us feel like it’s okay to treat everything else like pawns in our game.