Is AI Art Really Art?

Maureen F. McHugh’s short story collection After the Apocalypse was merely prescient when published in 2011, but it appears positively prophetic a decade later with its narratives about respiratory virus pandemics, frayed social connections, and increased political violence. Few of her tales, however, are as haunting as “The Kingdom of the Blind,” which will perhaps prove to be the most visionary of McHugh’s stories. “The Kingdom of the Blind” takes as its subject artificial intelligence, grappling with the possibility that any consciousness which arises from soldering board and circuitry may be so alien that it’s scarcely recognizable to us as a consciousness in the first place. The emergent process of consciousness as it develops in this AI is inscrutable and totally different from anything which resembles human thinking, posing a difficulty for the computer scientists who attempt to communicate with it.

In sparse, elegant, and beautiful prose, McHugh’s story describes how a massive interconnected computer program evolves a quality that could be described as “consciousness,” and yet how to describe the thought which animates this being is impossible. The main character Sydney reflects that as concerns the AI, “She didn’t know what it was. Didn’t know how to think about it. It was as opaque as a stone.” Readers and viewers of science fiction have long been familiar with artificial intelligences, but even at their most foreign—HAL-9000 in Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s or Lt. Cmdr. Data in Gene Roddenberry’s there is still something recognizably human in them. McHugh’s story poses a rather more alarming—and perhaps more realistic—scenario. Maybe we’d