I’m trying something different for this, where I talked out loud to myself about the topic before transcribing it to a document. I’ve edited what I said for grammar’s sake and overall coherency, but other than that it’s my stream of consciousness.

AI will only get better, easier to use and more prevalent. Sure, there’ll be setbacks. Bumps along the road. Possibly even legislative action against it. But it’s not going to go away. It’s only going to get bigger. Popular, but popular in that sense is more about how many people are talking about it, as opposed to how many people may genuinely like it. That’s an undeniable fact based on countless previous events in human history, as far as I’m concerned.

That doesn’t mean it’s a good choice, that it’s a good outcome. Visual art, music performances—whether they be on the stage or in a video game or anything between us. It’s all art. It’s all artistic expression. It was all started in the very beginning by people who felt the need to express something. Beyond just, ‘Hello.’ They just felt the need to express something, and that was it. And from that grew our concepts of art, create, creative thinking that goes beyond the practical.

A bright red tapestry that you hang on your wall has no practical purpose. The effort spent making it was. Wasted if you’re thinking in utilitarian terms. But you still want that tapestry. It looks good when you look at it and you feel satisfied. Maybe it ties the room together. Maybe. You just love the color red and you feel that it represents you. Whatever your reasons are, the specifics don’t matter. What matters is that for reasons beyond the practical you have found that tapestry appealing.

Let’s take the, the magnum opus moment. Where content generated by AI is effectively perfect. A TV show is produced. Oh, movie. Let’s say a movie. The visuals are all done by AI, voices, dialog, everything except editing which is probably still done by humans. You need to do some polishing, tweaking, but the creative work beyond editing, none of it was done by humans. It might be good. It might be just as good as a human made, human driven movie. But a lot of people talk about how they don’t see a generated content as having soul. And soul is the debatable concept.

I’ve always seen soul like, “this game is soulful.” “This music is soulful,” referring to the passion behind its creation. That’s what people can feel. I, I don’t know if I actually wrote a post about this or not, but if I didn’t, I’ll probably do it in the future about how I genuinely believe that. That art has innate passion in it that we can feel. That’s not a tangible thing per se, but if some sort of, maybe call it spiritual but, some ephemeral quality that other people who have not seen the creation process still feel when they see the finished product. It’s a piece of the creator, imparted into the creation. But that requires consciousness. It requires a distinct focus and expression of thought.

I believe that the day will come, sooner rather than later, that artificial intelligence truly is worthy of the name. That it will be able to think and feel, and act in no way different than a human mind. That it will be able to create art, with soul. That it, as far as we’re concerned has a soul. But what we call current AI, generative AI isn’t true AI. It’s not. I mean, it’s-it’s artificial, sure, but there’s no intelligence there. It’s pattern recognition. It’s very impressive. And I do believe that when we have true AI, it will not be a light bulb moment. It’ll just be a day when a non-sentient program that is very close to acting like a human just one day starts acting a little bit differently. Self-improvement processes keep working, and they hit the end of the trail to sentience that day. No one may even recognize that day when it happens. It might take a few weeks or even a few months before people sit and think, “Wait. This is a little too advanced for just an AI.”

It’ll be a whisper, not a bang. But we’re not there yet. We won’t get there for a little while. We certainly won’t get there before we reach a point where generative AI is able to make the content as good or better than any human generated content. I just question the purpose of that. Art without soul, without passion. It’s muzak. It’s like hotel art—it might look good, but it doesn’t feel like it was made to be made.

The great artists of the Renaissance, or sculptures of the east. Chicano art, urban murals, whatever. Many of those were not made with a purpose beyond creative expression—or if they were, creative expression was still at the core. The, for example, the Sistine Chapel, as I recall, that was a job that I believe Michelangelo did. He didn’t do it because he felt a divine motivation, he did it because he was paid. But he was paid to do it because they wanted him to create art for them. Plenty of restrictions. He worked around them in clever ways. But there is still that passion there that. He resisted those restrictions. And that in itself is a form of artistic expression. Generative AI just does what it’s told. The ultimate muzak, or artak creation machine. I just feel like without conscious creation behind the art. it just doesn’t have a purpose. It doesn’t speak to us because no one spoke to it.