AI won't replace you, unless you let it

Art, chess, and everything. Plus, a response of sorts to Ted Gioia.

Ted Gioia

, author of the wonderful

The Honest Broker

, recently posted this image over on Substack Notes.

As Gioia tells it, a young French artist contacted him, “asking if he should give up his vocation, because AI is replacing human artistry.” This was a cause for despair for this artist — enough that he was seriously considering giving up his vocation.

Gioia wrote him back, including the text in the image above. This is a well-crafted response that reflects a common way of thinking about AI. But respectfully, I have to disagree with Gioia here. He is absolutely correct that the young man should not give up on his vocation as an artist. It is just that the reasons cited by Gioia aren’t particularly compelling. I think we can do better.

Gioia’s argument, in outline, is that AI will never be able to replace a human artist because AI lacks the creative capacities of human beings. It cannot hear music, enjoy a meal, fall in love, and so on. By emphasizing the human elements – the things unique to human beings – the artist can insulate himself from the effects of the AI takeover of art. AI, from this point of view, is really just a kind of parody.

And to some extent, he’s correct. Current technologies which we call AI, falling under the specific heading of generative AI, aren’t the sort of things which actually feel anything. They are sometimes pejoratively said to be just incredibly good prediction machines, guessing at what should come next. I think this description is directionally true, a bit oversimplified, but not actually pejorative. It is genuinely impressive what generative AI can do, even if it has also led the internet to be filled with more and more slop.

AI in its current form does not think or feel. If art is meant to express our thoughts or convey an emotion to another – something Tolstoy would say – then AI art just cannot do that, even if it creates a relatively convincing facsimile of the real thing.

But imagine for just a moment that AI could think and feel. It isn’t inconceivable that such an AI could be developed in our lifetime. Given the available computing resources, such an AI could even become a significantly better and more productive writer, painter, musician, etc. than nearly any human being — or even every human being. What then of the young man’s vocation? Should he just give it up?

Of course not. But that means that whatever is providing for the justification of the young man continuing with his vocation is something else. His vocation isn’t ultimately grounded in human uniqueness, but that should not be cause for alarm.

Pablo Picasso

I am in love with human excellence. What I mean by this is that I love whatever human beings are to achieve through some mixture of talent, circumstance, discipline, and luck. I love that we as a species have Picasso, Turing, Dickinson, Morrison, and Ramanujan. Even though these are not my achievements, I take a kind of pride in knowing that we did all of that.

I feel this way when I look at great art, when I consider the boldness of the first space walk, when I see an image of the Pyramids, when I read a truly great book. Even when I know that the circumstances around a work are morally non-ideal – the Pyramids are the easy example here – I am still impressed by the fact that humans were able to do it. My heart swells.

Suppose, then, that tomorrow an alien species makes contact with us. We enter into friendly relations and begin a program of cultural exchange. We find that for every one of our great achievements, they had a similar one — but it was always a bit better. Their Picasso is better than our Picasso, their Dickinson superior to our own. They had a Socrates, but he wasn’t quite so grating. We would look at them at think that they were better than us, at least judged by the merits of their output.

But I wouldn’t think, then, that we should never make art, that we should abandon philosophy, that we should let them design all our buildings. By doing this, by offloading all of our creative work to them, we would be giving up on the idea that we were capable of greatness.

This is how we should view this hypothetical AI. It may be able to make better art than us, art just as authentic as human art. But it would not be cause for us to stop making art, because the AI’s art would not be our art. And I think that matters.

If you’re not quite convinced of my way of looking at things, let me illustrate my point with an example drawn from the world of chess.