IArtificial intelligence (AI) has no vocation to tell the truth, to produce beauty or to do good. Let’s start with the “true”. This famous ChatGPT, what have we not said about it? It is clear that Wikipedia plays a very important role among the many textual corpora on which this learning AI has been fed, and which allows it, among other things, to produce texts with excellent syntax and which very often hit the bull’s eye in terms of semantics.
The Wikipedia platform, underpinned by formidable algorithms, because it is more concerned with getting people to collaborate than pitting them against each other, taping them to the screen, depressing them or locking them in an information bubble, we says a lot about the difficulty of getting to the real thing. It is a slow progression, sometimes laborious, in spurts, in tension, unstable, always evolving, at the junction of multiple opinions, but which gradually converge and stabilize on what we will end up accepting as true, for now.
Nothing to do with ChatGPT which, without the approval, without the authorization or the accompaniment of the slightest human, steals Wikipedia, steals whole sections of texts from it, and mixes them with others, at all- from. Now, how does the statistical combination of texts aspiring with difficulty and gradually to the truth guarantee us the continuity of this aspiration? The syntax, yes okay, even if no more explicit rules really guarantee it (much to Noam Chomsky’s despair), the semantics too, unsurprisingly. But the real one? Moreover, the original authors of these same pages find themselves scandalously buried and anonymized in this infamous cocktail, this formless textual mass and its illusion of truth.
Subjective assessment
Then, the “beautiful”. Paul McCartney recounts how, inspired by Bach, he composed the formidable Blackbird. Today’s AI feeds on Beatles tunes to indigestion to produce imitation Beatles, soulless, uninspired and devoid of narrative. We produce Rembrandt from Rembrandt, Picasso from Picasso, but Picasso himself produces Picasso because, originally, he was fascinated and inspired by Rembrandt, Velazquez and others, in a perfectly not reproducible by an AI. Brancusi, angry, sculpts a primitive kiss in reaction to the mannerism and bombast of his master Rodin, a kiss that has nothing and yet everything to do with the kiss of the master.
The creative genius is there, off the beaten track, in this revolt, this emotional feeling, in this experience and this relationship to the world, this reaction to others, to those who precede. An AI, without a firm human hand to guide it, program it, can never claim the status of an artist. This process of subjective evaluation cannot be programmed in a machine, making it possible to guide and above all to select between the proliferation of possible symbolic arrangements the one which, resonating with the soul of the artist, increases his chances of success through his narrative. do the same with that of the public.
You have 44.61% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.