The debate about AI has been rending communities apart. My beloved literary community keeps arguing about the use of AI, and the debate has descended into name-calling, as in so many social media debates. It’s challenging to get your point across in 140 characters and even harder to find compassion for arguments made in 140 characters. But that’s a different post altogether.
Ted Chiang says that AI doesn’t make art because art is about communication, and communication is about intent. AI doesn’t have intent. Therefore, it cannot communicate. I do not disagree with him (I would never), but I feel like this argument amounts to letting the AI off on a technicality. AI doesn’t have intent, but the people using AI obviously do. Like a hammer that can be used to build a house or whack someone on the head, AI is a tool. As such, its impact depends on the tool's wielder. In the hands of the military-industrial complex, for instance, everything is a weapon.
Here’s how I see it. AI is a good tool for structured thinking. We’ve been placing a very high value on structured thinking for a while now. Since the scientific revolution, if you’re looking for a timeframe. Don’t get me wrong, structured thinking is fantastic. It brought us science, which brought us things like modern medicine, exploring space, and modern infrastructure like plumbing. It also brought us the atomic bomb and unsustainable fashion. Like I said, tools.
So, let’s say AI is as good or better (or at least will be quite soon) than humans at structured thinking. It’s excellent at summarising text and customising templates, and, yes, it’s suitable for writing a clear text about any concept you want it to. You can give the AI a paragraph, and it can write variations on that paragraph (try giving it a news article and telling it to make it more poetic. Hours of fun). Communication is about intention, but it’s also about the audience–whoever is listening. If I have a message I want to get across, there are various ways in which I can do it, and different ways would be better for different audiences. AI can help us make our communications fit the audience better. However, it almost invariably makes the message less interesting in the process–because it loses the unique author’s voice.
But being human isn’t all about structured thinking. Being human is also about non-verbal experiences. Being human is also about embodied experiences. We feel things in our body that we can’t always put into words. Words are my trade (and my love), but I’ve learnt from my music work that sometimes non-verbal things touch different places in us, places that are sometimes inaccessible to words. And it doesn’t make us less intelligent. Just more human.
AI is inherently text-based and cannot “understand” non-verbal experiences. It can emulate writing about non-verbal experiences, but it would never offer anything new there. We have different embodied and non-verbal experiences, and we can do our best to communicate them through words, music, painting, or dance. But the AI cannot experience these things, so it cannot add anything to this conversation; it can only reiterate things we tell it.
I know there’s AI music now, which is not technically verbal. But, currently, the AI music is pretty bad. It doesn’t actually create interesting, original music, even though it’s very good at rendering songs that have already been written. Some of it would get better in future models or whatever. But I suspect some of it has the same issue that the text-based AI has: it has no unique voice, only an amalgamation of everything we’ve put into it.
Here’s my point. For a long time, we have valued structured, verbal reasoning as the pinnacle of being human. Part of it is because emotions and non-verbal or embodied experiences are harder to measure “objectively”, and we’ve been obsessed with objective, rational science. Perhaps it’s time we value other aspects of being human and develop them. Not instead of rational and scientific thinking, but in addition to it. Because being human means having both verbal reasoning and embodied non-verbal experiences. Funnily enough, verbal reasoning and systematic thinking tend to be traditionally perceived as more masculine traits. In contrast, non-verbal communication, emotions, and embodied experiences tend to be perceived as more feminine traits. I could go into why we value masculine traits more than feminine traits, but that is really a different post altogether.
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