Don't Fear A.I.
The flute and the dirge.
Let me to tell you what’s not going to work under Capitalism.
Moralizing.
Moralizing is not going to work under Capitalism.
Trying to guilt people into not using a service because it’s better to pay human beings for their time than outsource their labor to machines is not going to work.
We’ve already run this experiment countless times. The Luddites failed and so will you.
This is The Velvet Sundown.
They don’t exist.
They’re a rock band with over a million monthly listeners on Spotify and they are entirely A.I.
The music, the lyrics, the voices, and each of the artists themselves on the band’s promotional page, are all computer generated. Nothing human about it.
Millions of fans.
Hey… how many fans do you have?
The Velvet Sundown released their first album early this year and took off very quickly. Almost nobody noticed they weren’t real. People only started to suspect something was up when they realized the band never toured and that none of the musicians had a social media presence.
“Computers can’t create art.”
You sure about that?
“Art is a fundamentally human endeavor.”
Is it though?
“A.I. lacks soul.”
Yea. Maybe. Then again, most consumers do too.
The reality is that A.I. is going to write books, make music, create art, film, and animation, and most people simply won’t care that what they’re consuming never had a human involved. Will the work A.I. produces be on the level of Shakespeare? Will it create works up to the standard of Mozart or Salvador Dalí?
No. Probably not.
But, then again, most of humanity can’t appreciate those artists anyway. A.I. can produce things on the level of John Grisham or John Green, and that will be good enough for the mass market. Beethoven? No. But it doesn’t have to be. The public listens to “WAP.” ASMR videos. This supposed highly spiritual and introspective audience for art mostly doesn’t exist. Porn where somebody turns into a monster. That’s what people want. They don’t read Paradise Lost or The Iliad or listen to Rachmaninoff, they instead watch skinny people slowly eat themselves to death over the course of five years on YouTube.
That’s the level most of humanity is at. The spiritual level they’re operating from is very low and A.I. slop will be more than enough for them.
You’re not going to win.
You’re going to be painstakingly bleeding onto your keyboard, trying to squeeze a modicum of Universal Truth from your lived experience to share with the world, and your view count is going to get dwarfed by ten seconds of A.I. video where a guy gets hit in the balls. That’s what’s going to happen. Fighting it is as useless as fighting the cotton gin and those of you who resist will be like the last guy who invested in a horse stable in New York, saying, “Them there automobiles won’t never catch on.”
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that Meaning is a two-way street.
In literary analysis there’s a lot of debate about whether an interpretation of a text must align with what the author intended in order to be “valid.” There’s a whole camp of people who insist that you’re supposed to get out of a text what the author intended for you to get out of it and that, if you don’t, then you’ve misinterpreted the work. You see this all over the place, from people arguing about the canonicity of Star Wars to the proper way to understand The Bible. “You can’t take that away from the text!” People insist. “That’s not what the author meant!”
Not how language works unfortunately. Not how art works. The Postmodern Movement pulled the curtain back on this decades ago but the general public (and, in particular, the religious public) has been reluctant to get on board. A.I. is going to force the issue. In the end, confirmation of the Postmodernist Viewpoint will be the lasting legacy of ChatGPT.
See, here’s a haiku. Maybe the most famous one, written in 1686 by Matsuo Bashō. It’s called The Old Pond.
Right…
So, what did he mean?
What, exactly, was Bashō trying to say?
Is the poem merely, as it seems on the surface, a brief description of an event? A short retelling of an amphibian going about its life as experienced by a middle aged man from The Edo Period?
Or…
is it more?
Was the author actually writing from a place of deep meditation, comparing the splash of water cutting unexpectedly through the silence with the emergence of Life out of the darkness of non-being?
The correct answer is:
It’s whatever you want.
You’re the meaning maker. However the poem speaks to you… that’s what it means.
“No!” Scream the men. “It can’t be!” Shout the women. “Meaning must come from outside myself! It must be objective! It must come down from somewhere on high!”
No it mustn’t.
A.I. is proving this in real time.
Look, here are some lyrics from The Velvet Sundown, the completely A.I. band:
In this case the “author” didn’t mean anything by these lyrics. It had no intention. It wasn’t trying to make any sort of a point. The “author” is just 1s and 0s playing a numbers game. Stringing together words, collage-like, based on millions and millions of examples.
Yet…
The words still resonated with people.
They probably resonated with you.
The author’s contribution to the work’s meaning here is zero and yet, absent any inherent, intended meaning of the text… it still moves people.
The words still matter.
“Dust on the Wind” conjures images and feelings into the listener, each person imposing their own framework of meaning onto the text. Many felt it to be a protest song against the war in Gaza. Others, with mention of “pride” and “flag” so close together, believed it a gay rights anthem. Still others saw it as a song about class struggle, harkening back to the 1960s when guitars, music, and protests were used to highlight inequality.
…
They’re all correct.
Meaning is what you make of it, and A.I. will force us at last to accept the Postmodern Critique.
There is *no* intrinsic meaning of a text or a work of art.
All such comes only from you, the observer of it.
Think. A tree falls in the woods. Does it make a sound? The answer is no. Sound is a relationship. Absent an ear-drum and a properly tuned nervous system to use it, the vibration in the air produced by the tree makes no sound, just as, absent an eyeball, electromagnetic frequencies produce no light. Let A.I produce ten thousand novels. Let it fill the galaxy with text and the internet with music and images.
All of it means nothing. Absolutely zero, until *we* come along and give it some.
In a way then, A.I. will be deeply affirming of Humanity, solidifying our position as the meaning makers of the cosmos. The Human element removed from the process of creation, all notions of intent and what the author meant will be gone, leaving us at last to grapple with the fact that such never mattered to begin with. Artists (here playing the role of ego) will be knocked off their high horse, no longer able to pretend that they’re the ones illuminating Humanity by the genius of their prose and instead forced to admit that it is the illumination of Humanity which makes their prose genius.
Illumination is read in to a work of art. It’s not extracted out of it and the level of Light in a person determines the quality of work they resonate with.
Again, what does The Old Pond by Bashō mean? What did he intend? Answer: Doesn’t matter. He’s dead. We can’t ask him what he intended and his work has to stand on its own, producing whatever it does in the hearts of those who read it. Same with Paradise Lost. Same with The Sistine Chapel. Same with Pachelbel's Canon and same, actually, with The Bible.
The “correct” interpretation doesn’t exist.
What the authors of Leviticus or The Gospel of John intended for people to get out of their work has never mattered, as evidenced by the fact that the texts have produced such a wide range of varied and often contradictory responses. Not even The Catholic Church, whom many run to to try and escape this problem, has dared to offer a definitive interpretation of the meaning of these books. Not because they wouldn’t like to mind you, but because they can’t.
It’s actually impossible.
Just as the tree in the woods cannot produce sound in the absence of an ear, meaning doesn’t exist without an observer.
All the deep thoughts, all the meaning, the swelling in your chest and the burning in your heart when you behold Michelangelo’s Pietà or when you watch King Lear… it comes from you.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
Yeah.
Meaning is in the eye of the beholder too.
A.I. produced content, and the increasing adoption of it by the mainstream, will be a blessing. Yeah, true, if you’re a writer or an artist it might also put you out of a job. Sorry. I’m in the same boat. Nobody cared when the factory workers or garbage men were replaced by machines and nobody’s going to care when the truckers or the artists are either. You can’t stop progress and, honestly, if you’re creating just to make money you’ll probably crash out eventually anyway. You have to make art because you love it, and very few of us have ever been able to support ourselves. Remember, as I say, the majority position is that a song called “Wet Ass Pussy” is worth paying money for. You’re not going to beat A.I. slop in such an environment. You can’t compete with machine generated Instagram Stories or a Large Language Model that threatens to rape a former candidate for the Minnesota House of Representatives.
But, while the computer is making us all unemployed it will also be affirming our centrality because all it does, everything, only has meaning if we give it some. If we read meaning into it.
…
You know, people can see all sorts of things in an inkblot test.
They can see all sorts of shapes in a cloud.
Why is it, after all, that the gods were always so fascinated with us? Zeus, Hera, Thor, even Yahweh of The Old Testament… didn’t they have anything better to do? Watching us fight, watching us have sex, watching us build and travel and explore, giving us assignments, condemning us… were they just that bored? Why do we matter so much? Why was all of Olympus on the edge of its seat for the entire Trojan War?
Well, because meaning comes from the human soul and always has.
Because we sit at the intersection of Heaven and Earth, Light and Darkness, Animal and Divine.
A.I. will take your job. Sure.
But, contra what everyone seems to be worried about, it will 100% affirm your soul.
If ‘illumination is read in to a work of art’… if the meaning of a work of art is not extracted but always exclusively projected by the subject… what then makes a work of art good or bad? Is it really the subjective opinion of each individual? Is the Sixtine Chapel subjectively beautiful, as is the Bible, Paradise Lost, or a sunset? What is it about the Bothers Karamazov that survives the passing of time? If truth nonexistent in artwork itself, what’s the difference between a dog crap and the Lord of the Rings?
We may have the freedom to choose to project any meaning anything we want. But if there was not a proper target we are to hit in the search for meaning, sin would not exist. One can attribute meaning to WAP, but WAP is objectively ugly and thus attributing to it positive meaning would be a sin (in the etymological sense of the word). Considering WAP a beautiful work of art would be to miss the target, but considering WAP ugliness in art form would be in closer resonance to its true meaning: degradation of human soul and of God’s image. Even if 100% of humanity considers it not to be so.
We may have the freedom to act as meaning givers, but meaning must pre exist our cognition. We are wired to search for meaning because meaning exists to be discovered, not invented, in the first place. Having the freedom to assign meaning is no proof of meaning’s non existence.
We are called to align our perception of reality with reality. We are called to enter into communion with Truth. Yes we are free to project any meaning we want, which is the same thing as saying that we are free to sin. The fact that a work of art can (as a possibility) be interpreted in multiple ways does not prove that meaning does not exist - it instead points at the fact that there is a True meaning to be sought and that the road is full of traps.
I'm not sure I completely agree, as I think art does more than just simply communicate. It also binds and gives structures to real communities of actual human beings. In the authors' time, this was true (think of groups like the Inklings), but I think after the death of the author this can also be true (there is a thriving community of people dedicated to the works of Lewis and Tolkien for example, whose entire lives have been shaped in conversation with their art).
Obviously, the intention of the author can never straightjacket a work forever, but it's also not totally irrelevant hundreds, maybe even thousands of years later (which in many cases in the value of literary scholarship, digging up that original context insofar as we can). That sense of communication with the author, tension with what they think the work should mean versus maybe what it actually says is, in my view, an important part of really experiencing great art. That is, of course, missing in AI-slop.
One thing that I do think has come out of the A.I.-ification of everything is a that self-reflective people are having a growing attraction to the tactile over the digital (see the resurgence of vinyl records in popularity) and the "indie" over the corporate in terms of things like music, written works, etc.
I'm of the opinion that AI may very well hollow-out mainstream culture, but I also think that hollowing out will make a space for actual humans to continue doing what we will always do (make and share art) completely detached from the shadow of the overarching digital hellscape that is probably going to emerge. That may be a tad optimistic.