AI “Art” Is Not Art.

People writing prompts for AI to create images and then considering themselves artists always makes me think of a toddler telling his robot Baymax, “lift this 100lb barbell,” or “get me the Cheerios from on top of the fridge,” and then happily squealing, “I did it!” I think it’s obvious that such people want the feeling of pride or accomplishment without actually having to do anything or to have any skill or talent.

If the so-called artist removed the AI from the equation and just published their prompts, that would be an accurate representation of how much “art” they actually did.

Some people argue that AI is merely a tool in creating art, in the same way a paint brush is a tool that a painter uses, but this is mere sophistry. AI goes beyond being such a tool. It’s essentially no different from someone telling their big brother, “write me an essay on euthanasia,” and then considering the work their own. It makes no difference whether the “tool” in question is another person or an AI with respect to whether the person barking out commands is really an “artist.” It amazes me that people can’t see that.

Of course, one could argue that even if the supposed art isn’t the art of the person writing the prompt, it’s still art, only it’s that of the AI. But this is wrong, too. AI “art” is necessarily nothing other than a rehash of all the millions of artworks that have come before it.

Based on a lifetime of being a native English speaker and hearing common usage of the word “art,” I understand the word “art” to mean something like the following: more or less freeform expression by a living being, which may or may not involve some medium other than their own body, that intentionally conveys some emotional and/or (possibly abstract) cognitive meaning to an audience in a creative (and hopefully skilled or talented) way. And AI is not a living being, nor does it have any intentions, intelligence or thoughts (see https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2019/09/13/on-the-possibility-of-artificial-general-intelligence/).

I also propose that “art” produced by AI comprises a subtle cognitohazard, in that one is being influenced and led astray by an enormously complicated machine masquerading as natural intelligence—as life.

Similarly to AI “artists” not being real artists, “vibe coding” is not real coding, though I wouldn’t necessarily argue that it’s something people shouldn’t do; it seems useful (when it works), and computer code is something intellectually dry enough that I wouldn’t consider its source very relevant to whether it, or its results, comprises a cognitohazard or not (though it’s very possible that coding or studying code isn’t something that’s ultimately healthy for anybody to be doing).

Though I would definitely suggest that something people shouldn’t be doing is using AI to help them write books, articles, etc. It outsources humanity, or the human touch, to something nonliving, and that’s actually scary.

Even more scary, though, is when people form emotional bonds with AI, especially making an AI character their boyfriend or girlfriend. This introduces the same cognitohazard explained above but on another level. (And while we’re on the subject, there is also the problem of LLMs obsequiously creating echo chambers with people that lead them down a path to insanity.) Even worse than that will be when sex bots become a thing and people start having intimate encounters with them. For the love of all that is holy, Just don’t!

The quandary we’re *really* pondering

When people ponder the “mind-body problem”, the “hard problem of consciousness,” and many other so-called problems, what they’re really doing is pondering the maze of analytical, linguistic, materialist concepts and mode of thought that they’ve become trapped in, looking for a way out. The way in which they’ve framed the actual problem is incorrect; they’re barking up the wrong tree.

With a correct perspective on life, or a correct cognitive approach, these issues and other metaphysical issues (such as chasing the nature of the world through physics) would dissolve, and we make such categorical separations as “mind versus body,” “consciousness/life versus non-life,” and “self versus other.” Life—what’s actually important in life, and the meaning of so-called consciousness, etc.—would become clear just by living it and looking at it.

There are indigenous cultures who have better vision in this respect, even if some of the ideological details of their worldview are factually incorrect. These relative details are not as important as we think, and besides, there’s a lot more truth in mythology than we think with our analytically, rationalistically trapped minds. The non-human animals are also better-connected to life.

Related links:
Sophia Cycles video essays explaining various myths, in reference to the “lot more truth in mythology than we think”
Dr Iain McGilchrist: We are living in a deluded world – YouTube, explaining how the fundamental ways we think about and perceive reality are severely imbalanced/pathological and the social consequences of this
myriachromat/Inhahe – On the Word Consciousness, explaining a bit about how we wrongly separate or “bracket off” what we call consciousness from everything else
myriachromat/Inhahe – Language is the Problem, explaining how the fundamental ways we think about and perceive reality are severely imbalanced/pathological
Laurel Thompson – Language Is the Problem, explaining how the fundamental ways we think about and perceive reality are severely imbalanced/pathological, and also certain remedies to this imbalance
Facebook – Darin “Stevenson” talks a lot about the systemic problems in our cognitium in a way that nobody else likely ever did or will, but you may have to do some sifting through posts to find relevant ones

My answer to the Quora question “is it possible that the Big Bang didn’t have a cause?”

I think there’s a tricky thing about answering this question that most people never consider. “Cause” may not be as simple as a binary “it was caused” versus “it was not caused.” There may be a plethora of relationships or sources in the universe/in existence that are like cause, or like what we think of how cause works, but not exactly it.

Our notion of causality is (a) 100% mechanistic; (b) 100% deterministic (to clarify, science doesn’t necessarily regard the universe as deterministic since the advent of quantum physics, but we tend to only regard events as being caused or causal to the degree to which they’re deterministic, while the rest is just “meaningless randomness”); (c) physical; (d) linear in time; (e) strictly a progression of time advanced by the same absolute, immutable set of laws; etc.

So, that’s a lot of constraints, and it’s possible that there are modalities of “causality” that satisfy some of those constraints and not others. Those possibilities are just rather hard to wrap our heads around, maybe because they’re different from what we observe in our everyday, macroscopic, non-relativistic, biological-perceptual, physically incarnate lives, or maybe because the success of science and technology has culturally entrained us to be scientistic, physicalist, mechanicalistic and entirely left-brain dominant.

For example, one possibility for this kind of causality-adjacent relationship may be found in science itself, or at least philosophy. We observe that the nature of this physical universe is just right for life to come into existence. If the fine structure constant were just a fraction of a percentage different, for example, matter and thus life would be impossible. So, we say that maybe there’s a multiverse, and every possible reality with every possible physical set of laws manifests “somewhere,” and this is just one of the ones in which life is possible to come about and hence to ask, “why is the universe suited perfectly for life?”. And physical theories themselves such as MWI and string theory tend to lead to such a conclusion, too, albeit without any direct evidence.

But the thing is, the big bang is thought by many to be the beginning of time itself. Or not exactly a “beginning,” but that time “curves around” at the big bang in higher-dimensional space in a way analogous to how the Earth’s surface curves around so that you can travel around it forever even though the earth itself isn’t extended infinitely in 3D space. So how, then, could the multiverse, or the principle of creation of universes, have created, or caused, this particular universe? It must have been done in some way that stands outside of time, or outside of time as we know it. This obviously violates a number of implicit constraints placed on our typical notion of causality, if not all of them.

Another such possibility is that God created the universe, or that maybe it was some spiritual being that’s enormous and advanced but not quite (directly) God. What is spiritual “causation” like? Who can imagine!?

Temperature Isn’t Just Temperature

We’re trained to see heat or temperature as completely measured and encapsulated by a single value, because that’s all science knows how to measure about it, but I’m convinced there’s more to it than that. There’s an entire “texture” or “quality” to the heat in the air, at least.

I think that because I notice that A/C air feels markedly different from naturally cold air, and in ways that can’t simply be accounted for by, say, a difference in humidity or smell, and it’s also too palpable and unexpected to be just due to the power of suggestion of knowing that the source of coldness is unnatural.

The quality of A/C air that I sometimes sense is hard to describe. It’s rather sickly in a sense from a car’s A/C, and from a house’s central A/C it feels kind of “brittle” and evil in a way—like being chilled by it is akin to being preserved in formaldehyde. It’s like you can just feel the time slipping between your fingers, but hey, at least you have more of it.

And hot air from a heater makes me tired, like I want to go to sleep. I lose myself, like I’m engulfed in chaos. Natural heat doesn’t have this effect on me, and I’ve been in both the humid heat of Florida and the dry heat of California, up to 104°F or more, and everywhere in between.

It’s a known scientific fact that warm water freezes more quickly than room temperature water. I think there is a known or theorized explanation as to why, which I forget, but either way, this corroborates my impression that temperature must be more complex than a single value. If it were a single value, warm water would have to take longer to freeze than room temperature water, because in the former case, the value would have to first lower from warm to room temperature and then from room temperature to freezing, and the temperature should lower at the same rate for both waters. Adding more complexity to heat or temperature offers ways around this.

Just think: if we’ve been so brainwashed by The Establishment and the limitations of science about the nature of heat and temperature, what else could we be direly wrong about?

By the way, I also have the feeling that psychic information may be carried from one person to another by an aspect of heat, or something closely related to the notion or physics of heat, that traverses exceptionally quickly. Something about us on an unconscious level just knows how to “decode” the information in this heat or this thing that’s heat-adjacent to get a psychic impression. This is why we feel uncomfortable sitting on a chair that’s still warm from the last person who sat on it: it’s too personal. Perhaps this heat-adjacent thing is spiritual/non-physical heat, while there’s a continuum of “densities” or whatever between the physical aspect of matter/things/beings and the spiritual aspect.