Automating inspiration

By Jason Lim

David Brooks, in his recent New Times Column titled, "In the Age of A.I., Major in Being Human," writes, "This is what many of us notice about art or prose generated by AI. It's often bland and vague. It's missing a humanistic core. It's missing an individual person's passion, pain, longings and a life of deeply felt personal experiences. It does not spring from a person's imagination, bursts of insight, anxiety and joy that underlie any profound work of human creativity."

Considering that we often see what we want to see, Brook's judgment of the quality of AI generated content sounds more like sour grapes than objective criticism. I have always been skeptical of the claim that great masterpieces somehow "speak" to us in a universal way. Rather, I believe we are inspired by the masterpieces because we project our experiences, values, and pain onto them and mostly because we were taught by others to feel this way because certain pieces were masterpieces while others were not. I am not saying that there are no differences between a DaVinci and Manga, but who is to say which is more of a masterpiece than the other? Eye of the beholder and all that.

So, we now face this defense of uniquely human ingenuity that supposedly cannot be reproduced by AI. Does it sound defensive? I believe that we were unpleasantly surprised and now feel threatened by the naturalness, substance, and fluency of what ChatGPT is producing. This shock was amplified by the realization that such an AI engine can effectively make many white-collar jobs obsolete. Until now, smart automation targeted the repetitive physical labor of blue-collar jobs. White-collar was safe. No longer. The human brain, that organ that makes us the apex predator of the world, is now under assault by our own creation.

The type of professional prose that white-collar workers produce on a daily basis ― mainly a combination of predictable sentence structure, cliched prose, and unnecessarily complex words often signifying nothing ― is exactly the type of prose that ChatGPT excels at. This is only natural since that is the type of writing that dominates both the workplace and, increasingly, the press. Machine learning is essentially all about mimicking what is read, seen or heard. Garbage in, garbage out.

But what happens when it is no longer garbage that is going in? What happens when masterpieces are fed into the AI engine, and it starts producing classical symphonies rivaling that of Mozart, writing novels that read like Dickens, producing plays that rhyme like Shakespeare, and 3-D printing ceilings that look better than the Sistine Chapel's?

Of course, critics will still claim that these are not originals; they are just copies without the creativity, genius, and soul of the original "human" artists. I do not know whether these critics have ever raised children, but imitating is how they learn, until they start to combine different influences in different combinations to create one that is uniquely their own. So then, what can AI not do? Let AI start combining different painting styles into one that is uniquely its own, one that the world has never seen before. Let AI draw prose from every master into one that is so fresh and new that it does not hark back to anyone who ever wrote before. This is an inevitability. Anyone saying otherwise does not appreciate that human history is all about building things that enhanced or automated what was previously uniquely human. And now, we are automating human ingenuity and creativity.

A profound work of human creativity can come from an AI that is learned enough and sophisticated enough to produce one. Further, the profundity of that work is not intrinsic to the work itself but is a function of projection by the audience. Within a few years, I dare say we would be just as inspired and touched by an AI-produced artwork as we would by a human one if no one told us about their respective provenance. With AI, we are just realizing that we are automating not only our cognition but also our inspiration. This is deeply disturbing.

It is disturbing because it punctures the only thing that is uniquely human: our anthropocentric worldview. The whole world revolves around our existence. We thought this literally just until a few hundred years ago. We have an instinctive drive to want to be unique as individuals and as a species, to be the center of everything that happens to us, and to want to rule over everything else. This is our collective illusion that is as strong as it is persistent.

Well, the ChatGPT phenomenon is calling us out, and we are engaging this threat in the most instinctive way possible. Fight or flight. Flight is ignoring what this means to the human experience and going our merry way until the current way of living becomes obsolete; the fight is shrilly proclaiming a uniquely human territory that AI cannot conquer, which is what Brooks is doing.

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture