Why doesn't AI threaten human creativity?

Artificial intelligence is perceived as devoid of life. Soulless and indifferent, it develops like gray slime. From year to year we hear about achievements in the generation of texts, pictures, voices, videos, and observation shows that progress does not bode well.

This problem especially concerns novice designers, artists, writers and musicians. Few people want to spend years to find themselves in the creative “The Last of Us” and realize that everything was in vain, right?

However, let's approach the problem philosophically. Is artificial intelligence really that dangerous for creative people? Are we under the influence of some irrational fear of AI that modern thought instills?

First of all, I would like to touch upon the paradigm in which we live and thanks to which we learned to create neural networks. We are born in the era of science and, give or take, we absorb the dominant worldview. However, this scientific ideology is not at all as ideal as we think.

Take, for example, the biological definition of life. Life, according to biology, is a form of matter that has a number of unique characteristics. Among these signs are metabolism, adaptability, reproduction, irritability and the like. In principle, advanced science can create a machine that will imitate all these characteristics very well. But there is one caveat.

In few biology textbooks we will find sensory experience as a necessary criterion for life. An experience that “first person“(also called phenomenal consciousness or qualia). Modern science, thinking “in the third person,” does not need this experience. More precisely, even harmful.

Feelings cannot be studied scientifically because they are subjective, that is, closed to an impartial observer. Therefore, it is easier for a scientist to describe the external behavior of organic matter than to imagine what does it feel liketo be a concrete being. After all, any such idea will only cloud the data on matter.

Methodological scientific materialism blooms and smells in our culture. In order to understand the world that lies beyond the senses, scientists must be distracted from them, as if pretending to forget that they live a sensory life. Hence the strength of science. By abstracting from subjective reality, thinking begins to understand objective reality and gains the ability to control it.

But here lies the weak side of science. The scientist does not answer the question about the role of sensory experience in being; the subjective gives motivation and the ability to think, but it is deeply alien to the objective world with its abstractions. Meanwhile, this is what allows us all, both scientists and non-scientists, to live. Creativity also depends on sensory experience.

Creativity is an aesthetic activity. Aesthetic from ancient Greek αἴσθησις“sensory perception”. But intelligence is artificial, therefore, it is a certain object that supposedly has no feelings at all. It invades the space of the sensual and replaces it. As a result, we begin to fear for ourselves, because no matter how much we value science, we live completely unscientific: we are given to ourselves in what we feel, we are our feeling.

Books and scientific videos say that there is a certain objective reality, and it is bigger, more important than our feelings. We begin to fear everything that can easily undermine our “so small” subjectivity. The very way of thinking inherent in people in the 20th-21st centuries leads to the perception of the artificial as dangerous. By the fact of its existence, the robot devalues ​​feelings and embodies the triumph of the insensitive.

Interestingly, ancient people were familiar with automata imitating humans, and no philosopher ever made a fuss about it. Not least of all, this silence was due to the fact that people believed in their irreducibility to the body. Man was not yet understood as a collection of physical, chemical and biological elements.

What problem does creativity solve? We create because we lack lived experience. Creativity complements the dry, nondescript world of objects, making it more alive. We also create because we want to share our feelings. The physics of drawing, melody, text is just a box where we put our feelings. Otherwise, why do creative people want to show “the work of their hands”?

Let’s say that in fifty years an intelligence will appear that produces content even better than that of “these leather bags.” Perhaps he will take on some purely market needs. But creativity will clearly not stop, because that subjective space of colors, tastes, smells, sensations and emotions, in the beauty and narrowness of which we find ourselves, will not disappear.

Let us even assume that it turns out, who knows how, that the machine has experience. But this will mean only one thing: she has turned into the same subject of feelings as we are. In our history, the presence of genius poets does not eliminate ordinary poets, and the presence of an artificial poet will not eliminate the natural poet. Creativity as communication will become even more interesting.

We create to communicate through feelings. We create to fill the lack of life. Making money from creativity is good when you need money. But most creators would like to create for themselves. Therefore, the professionals of mass labor will be replaced by professionals of art. People who will look for an audience that is interested in people, not robots.

The audience is not always stupid consumers. There are those who are looking life. Good authors unite an audience around them that is interested not just in their work, but in communicating with them through creation. Crowdfunding, fan clubs, art galleries, and much more will remain alive, because life is not limited to digital.

You can, of course, object, they say, go ahead and tell a robot from a person, they are similar. But whoever needs a real person, his sensory experience, is already searching for it. Those who do not need it have long ago become accustomed to treating a person functionally. Are there not enough creators who feel that they are being used as useful tool?

Creative people are afraid of losing a job they enjoy. But they have already lost such a job, they just didn’t notice it. After all, working “for someone else” is necessary for survival, and projects that a person is ready to undertake for the sake of a spiritual response can be done without money.

Another thing is that you have to make a choice: who are we, trembling creatures or not? We either tremble from the elements of the world, or we are “gods and sons of the Most High.” Until current science is surpassed by that science where physics exists for the sake of consciousness, and not consciousness for the sake of physics, our society will continue to see something threatening in artificiality. The way we are taught to think directly affects what we fear.

In a subject-oriented world there is nothing to be afraid of: living reason rules there, everything objective is only instrumental. In an object-oriented world, there are only “gallions” and “ugh, this is subjective”, and this is a side effect of some complex brain activity.

So to answer the question of whether AI threatens my future creativity, I need to start by defining who I am and why I am creating. Am I an object, and am I creating for the sake of survival? Or am I a subject, and I create for the sake of life?

If for the sake of survival, then, of course, artificial intelligence will enslave us, what survives is already one step away from death, and the laws of evolution are cruel. After all, there is no “us”, and people are also robots, and of an extremely outdated version.

But if for the sake of life, AI is not a threat, but another tool that helps you live. A person does not share objects and perceives not abstractions; sensory data is valuable to him. Such sensory data will always be in the first place for those who love life and seek beauty in itself.