Beauty cannot be explained

I have been putting off posting this for a while, but this post inspired me to get it done.

Image of the rooftops of the cathedral of Granada, a fine example of how beauty persists through time.

At the risk of expressing an unpopular opinion, I don’t think getting angry at AI and AI users is the way to go. For one thing, getting angry feels shitty, guilt-tripping is horrible and other than class lawsuits against the companies making unauthorised use of our creative material (done that, that database that was going around had quite a few of my books), it feels a bit like shouting at a mountain.

It is key to use the tools we already have to create laws that limit this new tool appropriately. But also? It’s totally legit to use the new tool and try and keep up with the developments that will shape our world in the next decades.

I don’t want AI to write my books, or any books that aren’t instruction manuals, really (and those better get double checked by humans because this week this thing couldn’t plan a simple itinerary because it couldn’t keep track what day of the week it was).

But that is not up to me, what I do know by playing around with it to learn is what this article has expressed so beautifully.

Beauty, Kant argues, cannot be captured by words or concepts; it cannot be explained, only felt. What we feel in the encounter with beauty, then, is a breakdown of our capacities for understanding and representation, and the emergence in their place of a “feeling of life” itself that defines our very being. This feeling pushes us to seek out others with whom we can share this sense of ourselves as absolutely unique individuals who, like beauty, cannot be reduced to any possible representation or identity. 

AI cannot do that, and it’s not just me being poetic, but by definition it’s impossible. I tested this by asking it to write a fanfic in the style of my favourite author (someone whose stories I have read hundreds of times and which I know AI datasets have scraped already) and it came up with something that was technically right and completely soulless. I have heard claims that it can write competent short stories before, but I don’t believe it. And I don’t believe it because all stories are an expression filtered through consciousness and that cannot be mimicked.

The moment AI can create real art of any kind will be the moment when we have to accept it has developed personhood. I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility, but I cannot see any proof that it has occurred yet.

And whether it happens or not, what I want to make sure is that I remain a person; that means that I have the social, analytical and life skills to cope with whatever life throws at me without reaching for a button. The post-apocalyptic genre is a great example of how humans know that all the tech that surrounds us is not really that reliable because it doesn’t belong to us. Computers are an attachment, and contact lenses, and fake teeth… and electromagnetic signal can fuck up it all up. Sure, technically bodies can be seen as an attachment too, but it’s the core one we can’t do without so… if you lose tech, who are you? What can you do to survive? To thrive?

And the answer is we don’t know, because the game has changed. But the internet changed the game (and the wheel, those 12 times it got invented all over) and we found new game. A new game that incidentally let me become an author and is allowing you to read these words I write almost instantly (and transfer me moneys so I can buy coffee, thx, btw).

But the words were in me already, and whatever you feel and think as you read them comes from you, something that was there before culture, language and even your senses.

At least that’s what I believe, and if you are with me there, then maybe you can see nothing comes from nothing, and whether one day we will have artificial intelligence in the true meaning of the word or whether it will remain a very clever robot… We will remain fully lit up and creative, as long as we remember that no one else can do the one job we are here to do: shine our own light.