AI and Being Human

A man looks at a burning newspaper - representing the destruction of democracy, the tools of autocracy, the burning of truth

Modern Inventions

Some modern inventions are so dangerous, we choose not to use them. Developed in the 1940s, for instance, the pesticide DDT and other persistent organic pollutants were either banned or restricted in a 1996 world treaty negotiated in Stockholm. Exemptions exist so countries can use these compounds to control mosquito populations where malaria is a problem, but otherwise we have decided their benefit is not worth their harm.

Nuclear weapons haven’t been used since the United States bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945. So far, although over 13,000 of these bombs remain in the world, no one has chosen to wreak such disaster upon the world again. We’ve managed to control ourselves.

Technological innovations are not so easily contained. We humans like gadgets, and if they save us time and energy, or feed our dopamine-starved brains, we flock to them. New ones are especially appealing. Perhaps that’s why AI is all the rage these days.

AI is not so much an artificial intelligence as a set of algorithms that stimulate software to learn as it encounters new data. The current breed of AI does more. ChatGPT, for instance, which many people have experimented with, responds to prompts offering prose, poetry, or computer code. Dall-E2 creates images. With Lumen5, anyone can create marketing or education videos using a simple drag-and-drop mechanism. Soundraw composes music from prompts about genre, instruments, mood, and timing. To add computerized voices to your video, use Murf, a text-to-speech engine. [1] This list includes only a few such programs available for public use.

Trying Sudowrite

I’m told it’s fun, using these tools. Since I hadn’t tried any, I couldn’t comment, so I chose one to experiment with. Sudowrite generates stories from prompts. It also will complete a poem if you give it five lines to start with.

Here were my five lines:

Who Do We Say that We Are

Once we were the tool makers,
the thinkers, the communicators.
Made in God’s image, but the image of God ever changes.
Now computers think for us.
Who are we when our brains grow slack and silent?

The program finished the poem with these questions:

Who is the soul in the machine?
And when do we become obsolete?
Does a human being really need to be human to be happy?
What if we could download our thoughts and feelings, and live forever?
Why am I always asking so many questions?

That last gave me a much-needed chuckle, especially since, as I try to revise this, my three-year-old granddaughter is sitting beside me asking what all the buttons are on the keyboard, why I’m pressing them, and when I stop to think, why I’m not pressing any. Her questions about the world are endless because she’s learning how to be human and alive, which is something no AI can be.

Souls and Purpose

But does that mean it has no soul? “Who is the soul in the machine?” Does a machine have such a thing?

Not everyone believes in souls, but if they exist, and if they survive our bodily death, it’s probably because we’re alive. I don’t think of machines as being alive, so I’m tempted to say that even if there are souls, they don’t have any. Of course, if we’re talking about things like cars and power saws and the buttons I’m pressing, then why not? They’re made up of atoms and quarks and things that spin in the night, so maybe it’s all part of the universal consciousness.

Of course, AI isn’t a machine. It’s a program, or a variety of different ones, yet all of them are but a collection of code, more elusive than thought itself. Even so, it could make us obsolete, could it not? If AI writes and paints and composes music for us, and if robots take over running the machines that build and clean and feed us when we are too infirm to feed ourselves, what’s the point of being alive?

But don’t we ask that already? After all, ever since alcohol was discovered, some people have chosen to waste themselves in drink. After we created television, some people started watching it all day. Is that a life? What’s the point of living if we numb ourselves to what’s around us and produce nothing but carbon dioxide? AI will make it easier for us to live in a world of make-believe, to become mesmerized by the entertainment they generate. If the point of living is to enjoy ourselves, I suppose that’s not all bad.

What Gives Us Meaning?

Years ago I read something, I think from some member of one tribe or another, who said that, instead of being angry with or shunning people who refused to work or pull their weight in the village, they pitied them. How sad, this person thought, to have no ambition, to have nothing we want to create or build or offer others, which is, of course, the point of creating and building. We want to offer something, and we want to be seen and acknowledged for what we’ve done. That acknowledgment can come in the form of money, recognition, or a place in the community. Yet even if creation is joyful in and of itself, Emily Dickinson notwithstanding, we want to share what we’ve produced.

Yet if machines can create art as meaningful and beautiful as what we create now, who will look at what we make? Who will pay us for things worth so little they can be generated with the press of a button?

At the moment, having used one AI program and having seen what ChatGPT has offered my friends, I’m not too worried. The quality is lacking. But this is only the beginning. I cannot fool myself into thinking that AI will never produce poetry on the scale of Audre Lorde or write novels as powerful as Octavia Butler’s. Already, the graphic art these programs produce inspires people.

What’s the Point of Creation?

Of course, AI can’t do any of that without prompts. We have to feed the machine questions, parameters, ideas. But there’s much in the creative process that AI can do for us. Sudowrite will not only create copy, but revise your text, plot your piece, and develop your characters. What, then, becomes of the creative process? Where will we find joy? Is there no value in wrestling with one’s characters and plot, allowing breakthroughs to emerge from the unconscious? From the reviews I’ve read, people are excited about having a machine do those things for them.

But maybe that’s mostly those who don’t already write poetry or compose music. If your mind doesn’t work that way, and the world would be a sad place if everyone’s did, it can be fun to play around with AI programs. But would the quilter want to lose her art to a robot? Would a cook be content simply to eat what a replicator gave them?

No one is telling me I must stop writing or composing, but as I said, few artists create simply for themselves. We want to communicate. Some of us even hope to change the world with our words and images. We hope to make a difference. How can we do that if we become artisans, a few of us sponsored by the wealthy and ignored by everyone else? That doesn’t sound like much of a life to me.

A man looks at a burning newspaper - representing the destruction of democracy, the tools of autocracy, the burning of truth

Will We Become Obsolete?

Creative artists wouldn’t be the first ones to lose their role in life. Fine woodworkers are rare these days, as are weavers, silversmiths, glassblowers, and shoemakers. As robots take over hard labor or surgeries, others of us are poised to become obsolete. Why should we artists be special?

We’re not. So when do we become obsolete?

There’s no guarantee we will, though if our lives change drastically, we will likely find something to put in place of what we’ve lost. But will that something make us happy? Or does that even matter? Is life about being happy? If so, then perhaps AI is what we need. After all, our technology already makes it possible for us to withdraw into virtual reality. Wouldn’t that be the epitome of happiness?

Besides, as the Sudowrite poem suggests, if we are nothing but our thoughts and feelings, then perhaps we could live forever. For thousands of years, people have been seeking ways to do that. Now, perhaps we’re there.

Our current understanding of the body and mind reveals, however, that we are a complicated system, that our bodies influence our minds which influence our bodies, so without bodies, I doubt we would really exist. Or maybe we would, but instead of being human, we’d be computers or algorithms. What is a feeling that has no body to sustain it? What is disembodied thought?

Humans Are Adaptable

Having written that last question, I stopped and entered what I’d written into Sudowrite, instructing it to continue writing the column for me. In doing so, it brought up a good point. It asked: “Will we become lazy, stagnant, and complacent? Or will we adapt to this new world and find new ways to create and express ourselves?”

We humans are adaptable. We enjoy solving problems and building new things. Maybe we won’t build museums to house large paintings or store bound books anymore, but maybe we’ll project images onto buildings and use holograms to decorate our yards. Stories might evolve in the way of an oral tradition, or books may be built like alternate universes, a billion different endings emerging from one idea. Perhaps we won’t only collaborate with the software, but also with one another.

I can’t say I’m excited about those ideas. I like wandering through museums, holding paper books in my hand. Yet, as the AI suggested, we will likely “continue to explore and push boundaries in our art, our writing, our music, and let the machines do what they do best: assist and inspire.” I know I do not produce anything on my own. I am already influenced by the sights and smells and sounds of a day, the things I’ve read and heard, the memories and surprises that trigger ideas, the generations of humans who came before me. Why not go to a program for that? Yet, while I appreciate some of the ideas Sudowrite, gave me, using the program didn’t give me the same satisfaction as dreaming and imagining and remembering on my own. Maybe that just shows how trapped I am in my Western individualism.

The Process of Creation

Even so, as the program wrote, “the real joy of creating isn’t in the end product, but in the process itself.” I love having an end product. Little in this world satisfies me as much as having completed a song or a book or a column. I love the act of creation, including the messiness when I don’t know what to do next, the times I must ponder and wait before an answer comes. Playing with language, choosing the right word, allowing a melody to flow from my fingers as I play, evoking a feeling or thought with metaphor—that makes the process enjoyable.

But it’s easy, and it’s time-consuming. Destruction is quick and easy, but whether we’re producing a society, a building, a novel, a table, or a cure for cancer, it takes time. It seems we postmodern humans don’t have much time to spend, nor do we want to pay for it.

So I worry about the younger generation, but what else is new? The values that matter to me don’t matter to them. The future will be what it is. AI won’t be hidden away behind locks and safeguards as nuclear weapons are, nor will it be shelved as DDT is. It will blossom and perhaps it will delight.

Delight in Figuring Things Out

Yet I wonder. Can we feel the same delight from feeding prompts into an algorithm as we do figuring something out for ourselves? My granddaughter—the same one who asks endless questions—was trying to take tape off a box so she could flatten it. It was not easy, and a few times she asked me to help, yet I saw that she was making progress, so I encouraged her to continue the struggle. And she did. She tried using force, and then she tried using reason, and finally, by pulling her and pulling there, she tore the tape off.

“Look, Oma!” she cried in delight. “I did it!”

We find joy in doing things ourselves, from succeeding when things are tough and solving problems and finding our way through the confusion and the pain of being human. When we figure things out, dopamine rushes to those greedy receptors and makes us happy. Where will we find that joy in fifty years? No matter what we think or feel or hope or wish, our phones and machines and AI programs are part of us now. We will evolve faster than we can imagine into something we cannot know.

Because Love Matters

So we can feel sad, scared, lonely, or whatever. Or we can remember something the AI told me. Art creates connections between us. It’s not just something we do by ourselves. We write or paint or compose with an audience in mind, and there’s a synergy that happens when someone sees and hears and feels what we’ve produced. In that synergy, something new is created, and part of what we create is relationship. Readers and viewers feel connected to us. We become connected to them.

AI can’t reproduce that. At least, not in the future I foresee. I guess you never know.

But there’s hope that we will continue to love and care for one another, that we will tend to each other’s needs, cook for one another, create for one another. We will do so not just because we enjoy doing so, but also because that’s how we enhance our relationships with one another, and relationships matter, because love matters. Life matters.

An AI is not alive, no matter how much it might like to be. Though I think I’m anthropomorphizing there. Still, no machine can take from us the fact that we’re alive. Unless, of course, we really are a computer simulation. If so, then none of this matters, anyway.

In faith and fondness,

Barbara

Credits

  1. Marr, Bernard, “Beyond ChatGPT: 14 Mind-Blowing AI Tools Everyone Should Be Trying Out Now,” Forbes, February 28, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2023/02/28/beyond-chatgpt-14-mind-blowing-ai-tools-everyone-should-be-trying-out-now/?sh=2ffe3df97a1b, accessed March 22, 2023.

Photo by Marcus P from Unsplash

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