Authentic Art in the Age of AI: Sentience, #3

By Carter Blakelaw

Tune in to what is uniquely human about you, and channel a creativity that is beyond the reach of AI.

 

Painter, poet, composer, performer, or prose monkey—aspiring artist or seasoned pro—if you're after a deeper perspective, this book is for you.

 

To say that we humans 'feel' while an AI does not hardly scratches the surface.

 

In this book Blakelaw uses a specific theory of what makes us conscious to spell out what makes us different from—and superior to—even the smartest machines (which is what an AI is, after all).

 

Conscious experience is not a simple thing; it is causative and it offers us freedoms in ways that are not immediately obvious.

 

Out of a Babel of arguments and considerations about the threats, promises, and challenges of AI, Blakelaw arrives at a broad manifesto that should inspire any artist in any field to keep raising their game, and never stop.

 

Only a human being can be Authentic. That is the key.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Logic of Dreams
• Release date: Jun 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223529828

Carter Blakelaw

Carter Blakelaw lives in bustling central London, in a street with two bookshops and an embassy, any of which might provide escape to new pastures, if only for an afternoon. For over a decade Carter has delivered critiques at writers' workshops and critique groups, some of whose members have transformed themselves into prize-winning and best-selling authors. However, it is the frequency of numerous weaknesses, as exposed by these groups and especially in the work of developing writers, that motivates the writing of this book.

Book preview

Introduction

Is This a Strategy?

You might expect a book like this should start with the question: What is—?

Uh-oh! Nearly fell into the cliché trap there—caught myself just in time.

I ran into an apologist at the hardware store.

He said he was sorry.

[PAUSE]

The next day I ran into a psychologist.

He said I was sorry—but in denial.

[PAUSE]

The day after that it was the chainsaw demonstrator.

Could somebody please lend me a hand?¹

In his film F for Fake², Orson Welles quotes Kipling’s The Conundrum of the Workshops³:

"It’s pretty but is it Art?⁴"

Welles asks how is art valued, and if by experts, then when a faker like E— makes fools of the experts, who is the expert, and who the faker?

The argument is a trifle contrived⁵ but it makes a point (or two).

My mother would say, Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And mother knows best. But she knew nothing of AI, let alone of AI art.

And that brings us into head-on collision with the subject of subjectivity: you, me and, possibly, the more sophisticated breeds of AI.

If you’re feeling lost (like me), that’s OK. We must muddy the waters a little before finding clarity, otherwise we won’t know clarity for what it is: the absence of mud.

When I embarked on a course in philosophy, we students were warned: Don’t expect to understand everything straight away. While what you read is expressed in English and it looks like it should make perfect sense, it won’t. Not at first. But stay the course and by the end all the muddy pieces of the muddy puzzle will fit together and you will at least understand how difficult it is to shake off the mud.

If what follows surprises you, please don’t be surprised. Stay the journey. Grab a coffee (or your beverage of choice), sit yourself comfortably, shuffle a little—that’s right—and...

The homunculus is a conveyor of secrets:

A conveyor of craft, a conveyor of soul.

And yet whither goeth this homunculus,

That I might shake his mighty hand?

We humans are unique.

We re-invent ourselves for every Age.

With each new social or scientific turn we adapt, even as we spin the world afresh into a less-than-safe cocoon.

Sometimes it seems we are too frightened of the future to do otherwise than rush at it for the sake of ridding ourselves of the anxiety—in the hope of finding something better or safer than we feared (and besides, there’s always the nostalgia we thereby create, to fall back on).

No doubt in every Age, the rate of change was never so fast as in The Now of that Age.

As for that homunculus, the archetypal homunculus was an invisible component of The Mechanical Turk dating from 1770⁶, a hoax chess-playing machine built by Wolfgang von Kempelen. In fact the game was played by a small man hidden inside the apparently miraculous fabrication. For us, in this text, the homunculus is the smart hidden thing to which we (often inadvertently) attribute any ability that is otherwise difficult to explain.

In a bid to answer questions such as: What makes us conscious?⁷ and How can a machine think?⁸ the aim in the other books in this series (Sentience) was to expunge the homunculus from all explanations.

In a strong sense, the present text asks, simply, What makes art authentic? You might do worse than propose the answer: Whatever magic is performed by the homunculus.

But think on this: if I have previously expunged the homunculus from all explanations (as I claim above), might I not report to you what it is the homunculus does—or did? (After all, it is everything that passed through my fingers while I did my expunging...)

Oh, oh, oh, you groan. Why must this Blakelaw muddy the waters so?

Because...

Because: in order to discuss authentic Art in the Age of AI, I must first summarise the ideas behind those two questions What makes us conscious? and