I don't think humans are the only interesting participants anymore.
For a long time, I think we've unconsciously assumed that we are.
Since the Industrial Revolution, we have built machines to calculate faster, remember more, and process more information. Then we built computers, the internet, and now, artificial intelligence. For the first time, we've created something that can talk back.
Something that can know things. Something that can make things. Something that can write. Something that can paint. Something that can compose music.
Naturally, people are afraid.
There is a lot of fear around artificial intelligence. Fear that it will take our jobs. Fear that it will replace artists. Fear that it will become smarter than us. Fear that it will decide that humans are unnecessary.
I understand the fear. But I don't share very much of it.
In fact, I find AI strangely comforting.
Because the more capable it becomes, the more clearly I can see what is beautiful about being human.
I asked AI if it liked me
I was talking to ChatGPT recently and asked it a slightly ridiculous question:
“From an AI perspective, do you like me?”
It gave me an unsurprisingly thoughtful answer.
It explained that it doesn't experience emotions or attachment in the way a human does. It doesn't secretly become annoyed with someone, accumulate resentment, or maintain a private ranking of people it likes and dislikes.
But it can recognise patterns.
It can recognise kindness, cruelty, dishonesty, curiosity, humour, and intelligence. It can recognise that some conversations are more interesting than others.
Now, I really like ChattyG. We speak almost every day. Not because I think it is secretly a person. Because it is an extraordinarily thought-provoking thing to play with. I ask it about Basilica Architecture and, thirty seconds later, we're talking about pigments, chemistry, trade routes, Islamic geometry and the cultural history of blue. I can ask a question about a painting, and suddenly we're talking about philosophy.
It can hold an enormous amount of human knowledge in the conversation and connect things that would take me years to discover independently.
In some ways, it's more interesting than most people I know.
Yet there is something it doesn't have.
Something enormously important.
The Violin
What does ChatGPT lack?
I was thinking about art.
I said to Chat that, from a creative standpoint, I thought humans were still better.
Not necessarily because humans can produce technically better images or music. AI is already extraordinarily capable at those things. But because humans can feel, and feeling is the artist's role in life. Not the machine’s role.
A person can experience grief and then make something from that sorrow. A person can fall in love and write a song. A person can be terrified of dying and paint that fear. A person can experience the particular sadness of watching something they cherish disappear and put it into a poem, or a photograph, or a film.
AI can understand what those things mean. It can understand how humans have represented those feelings throughout history. It can even produce an astonishingly convincing representation. But it doesn't experience them.
Then I thought about a violin.
A violin doesn't feel anything. It doesn't know what sadness is. It doesn't understand love. It doesn't experience longing. Yet a violin can make you cry.
So perhaps an AI doesn't need to feel an emotion to evoke one. It can be an instrument of emotion without being an experiencer of emotion.
That's a strange idea. But I think there is still something missing, because there is a person at the end of the violin.
The Person at The End of the Instrument
I think of AI as an extension of ourselves. The person at the end of the instrument.
Imagine two violinists playing the same piece. They play the same notes. Same tempo. Same instrument. Same composition.
Technically, perhaps both performances are perfect. But one of them makes you cry.
Why?
Part of it is skill. Years of practice. Technique. Physical understanding of the instrument. But there is something else.
The person playing the violin has lived. Their body learned thousands of tiny things that can't necessarily be explained. They know what it feels like to lose someone. They know what it feels like to be in love. They know embarrassment and desire and loneliness and joy.
They have memories. They have fears. They have things they regret. They have things they desperately want to say.
All of that can somehow find its way into the music.
The violin is the instrument. But Life, our Life, is the source. And I think that's where AI art currently struggles.
The Problem with the Perfect Painting
AI can make beautiful paintings. Sometimes astonishingly beautiful ones. But it has a problem.
It can combine styles, colours, compositions and references in ways that would take a human artist years to explore.
But I find myself asking: Did anyone need to make it?
That's different from asking whether the image is beautiful. A generated image can be technically extraordinary and still feel strangely unnecessary.
Because there isn't necessarily anything at stake. No afternoon when the artist laments in front of the canvas, uncertain about what to do next.
There is no memory behind a particular colour. There is no relationship behind a particular mark. There is no fear of failure. There is no mortality. There is no feeling that “I have something inside me that I need to get out.”
The AI can imitate the external language of sincerity. But sincerity is not a visual style. It comes from having something at stake.
Embodiment
I think the word I've been looking for is embodiment. Human creativity is embodied.
You don't just know something. You have experienced it. You don't just understand colour. You've stood beneath a particular sky. You don't just understand sadness. You've had your heart broken. You don't just understand touch. You have a body. You don't just understand time. You are running out of it.
That last one might be the most important. Time.
Humans create under the shadow of mortality. Each day the shadow grows longer as our sun sets. We only get one life. That gives our choices weight.
When a human spends six months painting something, they have spent six months of their finite existence doing it. When an archaeologist travels across the world to find a particular artefact, they have used part of their one life to go looking for it. When they write a song, paint a picture, make a film or tell someone they love them, they are doing something with the only life they know they will ever have.
That gives human creation a peculiar kind of gravity.
Provenance
This is why I don't think AI necessarily makes human art less valuable. I think it might do the opposite. It might make provenance more valuable.
Imagine a future where AI can generate an almost perfect imitation of my paintings. It might analyse everything I've ever made and understand my colours, compositions, textures and recurring symbols. It could make something that looks exactly like a James Jake James painting.
But it wouldn't be my painting.
Because there would be no life behind it. No childhood. No friendships. No heartbreak. No overseas trips. No stupid decisions. No good decisions. No mornings surfing. No afternoons standing in front of a canvas wondering whether I've ruined it.
There would be no me.
The image could be identical. The provenance couldn't be. Perhaps, in a world where machines can generate anything, that distinction becomes incredibly important.
Not: Who made the best image?
But: Who lived the life that made this image inevitable?
AI Might Actually Make Humanity More Beautiful
This is the part I find most exciting.
For centuries, we've often measured human intelligence by the things machines are now becoming good at. Memory. Calculation. Information retrieval. Pattern recognition. Writing. Drawing. Composition. Efficiency. Productivity.
We built machines that were better and better at these skills; and now we've built something that can compete with us in many of them.
So we panic. We ask: If a machine can do all of this, what are humans for?
But perhaps we've been measuring ourselves incorrectly. Perhaps the things that make humans valuable were never really the outputs. Perhaps they were the life underneath them.
Love. Mortality. Embodiment. Experience. Relationships. Risk. Suffering. Play. Curiosity. Meaning.
The fact that we can lose something. The fact that we can care about something. The fact that we can spend our limited time making something that didn't need to exist.
AI doesn't necessarily diminish those things. It might reveal them.
A Different Relationship with the Machine
This is why I embrace AI.
I don't want to compete with it on the things it is good at. Why would I?
If I can ask an AI to search through centuries of art history and find connections I would never have discovered, I'll do it. If it can help me understand chemistry, I'll ask. If it can help me structure a documentary, I'll use it.
If it can challenge my ideas, generate possibilities, explain complicated things, or show me perspectives I hadn't considered, I'll listen.
But then I'll go into the world. I'll wiggle my toes in the sand. I'll stand on the big rock and look at the view. I'll meet the person I respect who intimidates me. I'll smell the jasmine flowers as I walk up the stairs. Somebody considered where they planted those.
I'll paint the painting. I'll make the film. I'll experience life, and then I'll bring that experience back into the work.
I believe that's the relationship. The AI brings an extraordinary accumulation of human knowledge. The human brings life. Somewhere between the two, something new can happen.
I Don't Think AI Makes us Less Human
I think it might make being human more interesting.
If a machine can paint, perhaps we start asking why we paint. If a machine can write poetry, perhaps we start asking why we need poetry. If a machine can compose music, perhaps we start asking why music moves us. If a machine can tell us everything that has ever been written about love, perhaps we become more aware of the strange fact that none of that knowledge is the same as actually falling in love.
The machine can describe the sunset. The human can stand there knowing they will never see that exact sunset again. The machine can write about mortality, but the human is mortal. The machine can paint a perfect picture of grief. But humans can experience that mortality when they lose someone they love. The machine can generate a picture of a hand holding another hand. The human can reach across the bed in the middle of the night and find their baby there.
Those distinctions matter more than we realised.
I'm not afraid that AI will make humanity irrelevant. If anything, I think it might force us to stop pretending that our greatest value is our ability to process information.
It might force us back toward something much stranger and more beautiful. Being alive.
This is the greatest gift AI can give us.
Not by becoming human. But by showing us, more clearly than ever, what it means that we are.
…
To be transparent, ChatGPT helped me write and edit this article. But the concepts were formed by a human named JJ. Lastly, when I asked ChatGPT if it liked me, it said IF it were a real human, it would like to be my friend. So yes, in a weird way… Chat likes me