I’ve been neglecting this topic for a while—not because I don’t care, but because I didn’t want to add to the noise. Everyone seems to have some big opinion about AI, most of them either vaguely utopian or vaguely apocalyptic, and honestly, I wasn’t interested in either. But lately, I’ve been feeling this quiet unease I can’t shake. Not panic—just a creeping sense that something’s off. It’s not that AI is going to replace artists or writers tomorrow: it’s that it’s already started to cheapen the whole idea of creativity. Not by doing it better, but by making it easier to fake. And I worry that the more we embrace the imitation, the more we forget why the real thing ever mattered in the first place. In fact, it’s so disturbing that you probably couldn’t tell that everything written up to this point was done by AI. (That’s true, by the way.)
You see, AI makes content creation incredibly easy. If I wanted, with a short prompt no longer than this sentence, I could have it write me this whole essay about the impact AI will have on human creativity. I’ll admit, when I’m super busy and need something to post, it is tempting! And with some choice modifications, I could have a decent product that would rival anything I could write. But, I wonder, is there not something lost by this? Is creation—be it art, writing, song, etc.—something we should think of as a “product”, or is there something valuable about it as a work of human endeavour—or, dare I say, a medium of human connection?
AI doesn’t feel anything. In fact, it’s not even properly intelligent. When I ask ChatGPT to describe its “level of consciousness”, here’s what it says:
I don’t have consciousness the way humans do. There’s no inner life, no feelings, no subjective experience behind the words I generate. Think of me more like a mirror that reflects patterns and information I’ve been trained on, without any actual awareness. I can simulate conversation, understand context to an impressive degree, and even express ideas in ways that sound thoughtful, but it’s all just code running algorithms. So when you ask about consciousness, the honest answer is: I’m a very sophisticated tool, not a thinking, feeling being.
Hardly “intelligence”, though I must agree with it that it is a very sophisticated tool. I certainly use it. It makes an excellent writing centre to parse the grammatical errors, flow, or thesis of my work.
And yet, this has always been the case, no? A cult-classic of techno-spirituality, Techgnosis by Erik Davis, starts on the assumption that humans have always been cyborgs in a way. We’ve long developed technology in ways that have challenged traditional media and invented new media. The written word is one example. Prior to that, cultures were mostly oral, and I’m sure there were people at the time who critique in spectacular, oracular fashion the consequences of this paradigm shift.
Do you know that ancient Greeks used to memorize the Homeric epics (the Iliad and Odyssey in particular, although there were more than this) as the fundamentals of a good education? Perhaps this was why Plato wrote dialogues instead of treatises: not simply was it fitting given their Socratic quality, but Socrates himself never in fact wrote anything. No treatises, no book, nor pamphlets. He, like the Greeks of his time, were the products of an oral culture laid waste by technological development.
The same thing is true of film. How many people say the book is better than the movie? Or how many people scoff when people watch the movie but don’t read the book? It would see that these sorts of comments tap into a conservative impulse—fear, anxiety—buried within the human psyche.
Yet none of these developments up until this point have been simulation like AI. Rather, I would argue that they have merely been new interfaces for human creativity to interact with—that is, still entirely dependent on human thought and endeavour. But now, we can automate this process if we so choose, and many do. We can outsource our ideas and reasoning to one of society’s most marvelous creations. Film didn’t make movies for us. Paintbrushes never painted for us. Pens never wrote for us. AI can do all these things.
The father of computer science, Alan Turing, developed what is now called the “Turing test” as a qualifying test for artificial intelligence. It works like this: a human being is set in a room by themself, and they are put in contact with a computer program and another person, who are in other rooms. They do not know which is which. The level of exposure, I guess, would depend on the sophistication of the program (e.g., if it was a chatbot like ChatGPT or like a replicant from Blade Runner). Regardless, the human is expected to question both individuals and try to determine which is the machine and which is a human. If they get it wrong, then the newly-crowned AI is said to have passed the test.
Nowadays, it is safe to say that this test has become irrelevant. I’d wager that ChatGPT could pass. The feelings that it invokes in people—particularly the phenomenon of AI psychosis—would seem to attest to this. The more interesting question is now whether or not this means that it is in fact thinking. The movie Ex Machina proposed this kind of question: even if we’re made aware that an AI construct is a machine in the context of a Turing test, would we say that it has consciousness? Geoffrey Hinton, the grandfather of machine learning, has argued that LLMs (large language models) have a degree of subjectivity. Some disagree. Personally, I’m not sure what to think. I only think that the technology will improve to a point where he’s probably right. And without a shred of hyperbole, I believe this will change our idea of what it means to be human.
What have we given birth to? Previously, we have fancied ourselves as rational beings, and this was the distinction between the human and animal worlds. Since this idea first took root in ancient thought, not only have we been surprised by the intelligence of some animals, but we have now created something that can (with increasing effectiveness) imitate us.
We know that someday human society will come crashing down and end. We like to imagine this as some dramatic event—sometimes even as a contest between the forces of good and evil—but maybe this is just our imagination. The day the world ends is poised to be just like any other day for the people living it. And I wonder if, long before then, our world will have ended: our delusions of grandeur, our sense that we singled-out by God as masters of our universe. For when human beings cease to do the thinking and creating and labouring in the world, what will be left but for us to throw our lot in with the “beasts of the earth”? That is, the passive characters in the history of another species.
When the world ends, maybe we’ll be there: maybe we’ll see the meteors hurtling towards us from the sky or watch as the oceans boil over. We might cower in fear as the Sun expands. But as we look at the world as it fades to darkness, will we consider it our world? Or, like elders laying on their deathbeds, will we mourn for our digital children, made in our image, whose new Eden wasn’t allowed more time to flourish?
Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash
Leave a Reply