On AI and Creativity
As usual, The Onion said it best: “Guy Who Sucks At Being A Person Sees Huge Potential In AI.” What was revealing, however, were the comments that appeared below the headline on social media. One person in particular made the case that artists were threatened because AI shatters their illusion that humans are special, going so far as to say, “There’s nothing special about sentience. We are lines of code. And lines of code can be replicated.” (As unsparing as this may sound, I’m not convinced anyone actually believes it. Would this guy regard an ailing family member as a fading line of code?)
To my mind, the question of whether humans are special is at the heart of issues surrounding AI. If persons are indeed made in the very image of God, all their artifacts are shot through with varying degrees of significance. If, on the other hand, persons are simply lines of code, the value of their output can be measured mainly in terms of its current utility. In this paradigm, whatever isn’t current is potentially obsolete. Steinbeck’s East of Eden served an apparently vital function upon its release in 1952. Today, however, it’s simply too long-winded and culturally remote to do anything more than decorate somebody’s mantlepiece.
Speaking of Steinbeck, one of the questions now facing us is whether we should use AI to complete the unfinished novels of deceased authors. A writer like Nathan Dunne certainly thinks so:
There is an entire realm of unfinished novels that could be completed. We could discover what happens to Jane Austen’s Charlotte Heywood in “Sanditon” or how Cecilia Brady copes with her grief in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Last Tycoon.” Then there’s Kafka’s “Amerika,” Nabokov’s “The Original of Laura,” and the mystery of Sylvia Plath’s second novel, “Double Exposure.” And if we go back to the earliest texts in Greek and Roman literature, we might even complete Euripides’s “Iphigenian Aulis” and Plautus’s “Amphitruo.” Many of these works are in the public domain.
A direct challenge to this sunny take arrives from Jessica Hooten Wilson. Having spent the better part of 13 years on Flannery O’Connor’s incomplete novel, Why Do the Heathen Rage?, she ended up delivering a book that offers “a literary excavation where people can see behind-the-scenes into O’Connor’s world at the time of her composing the novel and what she was up to.” Unsurprisingly, some readers were disappointed to discover that the end result wasn’t a finished manuscript. Instead, Wilson had opted to honor O’Connor’s vision, rather than capitulate to consumer demands. People in Dunne’s camp, on the other hand, would be all too happy with the byproduct of an AI unit. As long as we get that coveted ending, all’s well, right? We could even spruce it up by making it more socially conscious and adding progressive sexual themes as well. This would help to “connect” with a new audience and “meet them where they’re at.”
Does it matter if the finished manuscript of Why Do the Heathen Rage? is an O’Connor/AI hybrid? In a word, does it matter if it’s not Flannery O’Connor? Perhaps not if you view humanity as glorified lines of code and if you measure artistic worth purely in terms of market value. If there’s nothing inherently special about Miss O’Connor, then why not nab a complete novel? For that matter, why stop there? You could mix and mash stories, cross an O’Connor novel with 50 Shades of Gray and see what happens. If, on the other hand, O’Connor’s “sentience” is a property of an immortal soul, the work she’s left behind is worthy of honor and respect. Her signature means something. When that soul has stopped talking to folks this side of eternity, we should honor that silence. Tacking on a makeshift ending, crossing the book with pornography, or throwing in a lesbian twist would all constitute acts of vandalism—not creative collaboration.
There’s a larger conversation here about the nature and value of creative work in today’s voracious culture industry. I don’t pretend to have my head wrapped around all the implications of AI—I doubt anyone does—but I’ve spent my career doing work that falls under the creative heading. I’ve even gone so far as to publish a short story and I hope to do so more in the near future. I’ll confess that I’m disturbed by the number of Christians infatuated with AI’s “creative” potential, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Ours is a pragmatic age after all and if the key question is always “Does this work?,” rather than “Is this right?,” or, more tellingly, “Is this real?,” it’s little wonder that we tend to prioritize machines over minds.