Art and Individuality

7th September 2023

Introduction

In this post, I write about human individuality as the basis of creative writing and the arts generally. This is a reaction against the idea that art can be produced by machines rather than human beings. I start from the belief that art is essentially a human activity; this accords with most of the definitions of art that I have seen in reputable sources. My argument is, therefore, that art produced by machines is not art, whatever its inventors might claim.

Individuality

Most artistic activity is undertaken by single human beings; not all, because it can also involve collaboration in groups of individuals. An opera or musical requires a music composer, a lyricist and possibly also a choreographer. Art is the expression of ideas or emotions and these are things that are essentially the outcome of human experience. When an artist makes something – a painting, a sculpture, a music score, a ballet – he or she is expressing something drawn from their personal experience of life or from the community in which they live. That is fundamental to understanding art as a human activity based on living. That is something that has been going on since the dawn of civilisation. What makes a work of art interesting is what it reveals about its creator and the society in which that artist lived. Even the most abstract painting says something about the person who produced it and the society which existed at the time. A collection of abstract paintings tells a story about the person or persons whose work led to its creation. This understanding of what art is becomes undermined by those who insist that it is possible to produce art without direct human involvement. It is claimed that artificial intelligence can create works of art. This article sets out to repudiate such claims.

The Threat of Artificial Intelligence

Is art, that has not been created by human beings, capable of legitimately being called ‘art’? No. Art can be produced only by human beings because that is what the word art means. I concede that the word ‘art’ is associated with a wide variety of activities, some of which are not generally considered to be art but are in fact, artifice. Writing is a type of art; most people would think of a novel or a poem as being a work of art. Our language frequently confuses ‘art’ with ‘artifice.’ We talk about ‘martial arts’ when we mean martial artifice or possibly ‘expertise’ or ‘craft.’ That aside, what do human beings want to enjoy that is artistic? People engage with art because it means something to them about human life (even if it is very abstract in its style.) We value art because it is produced by other humans and by being an audience of art, we are enjoying both the art itself and our appreciation of the human who produced it. A book is a window into the life of the author; a symphony is a window into the life of the composer. It is through those windows that the creators speak to us. An artificial production would create a window to a machine and we would hear nothing.

Would I want to read a story generated by a piece of software? Of course not. My reading connects me to the man or woman who wrote the book. My listening connects me to the soul of the composer. Great art gives me a mystical experience; it moves my soul. Artificial art has no soul. It is devoid of the human element that makes it worthy of our interest. Novels connect us to their authors. I do not want to be connected to a piece of digital programming. A story generated by a computer is soulless. It is bereft of human qualities, however much it might attempt to mimic them. AI robots analyse novels and formulate rules that govern the composition of fiction and then use those rules to string words together. The result is a body of text that imitates human fiction. I fear that AI might be able to replicate the kind of formulaic stories that constitute pulp fiction; fiction that is written to a kind of programme by humans but which lacks creativity or depth because it sticks rigidly to preconceived ideas. A good novel observes certain rules and standards but often bends those rules or even breaks them to produce something startling and new. What I cannot understand is why experts in AI are bothering to work on writing fiction. If such efforts are to create tools that assist humans to do a better job of fiction writing, then I can see the point of it. After all, I use software to help me with grammar and spelling. If I am writing a novel, I could use software to help me plan a story, write about characters that are consistent in their speech and behaviour (at least as consistent as real human beings are) and produce a novel that is of a high standard, in technical terms. Even if I did that, it would still be a human work of art. I do not need software to assist me in dreaming up the plot and telling the story. There are some, I gather, who would want to go further and dispense with the human author altogether. Why? If the result is an artificially created novel, would anyone want to read it (in preference to one written by a human?) It is to be hoped that the reading public will avoid such artificial works and read work that is known to have been created only by a human being. If there is no demand for artificial art, its producers will stop doing it. The motivation of technocrats is to make money and if there is no market for artificial work they will move on to something else that is more profitable.

Digital Age – Benefits

The digital revolution is not all bad; this article is being written on a personal computer, aided by a spell-checking programme that instantaneously shows where I have made typing errors. Such software was used to produce all my novels and my anthology of poems. What I have never used, is the kind of software that prompts me to write in a certain way. What you see is what you get and what you get is me (warts and all). Artificial Intelligence is being used to research art and culture; this is no bad thing. It can increase the power of analysis, and, used intelligently, by groups of human beings, extends our knowledge and understanding. This is the case where researchers are attempting to analyse large sets of data as part of their scholarship. This is very different from the use of digital processes that intervene in and change the very nature of the creative task. Computers are tools used by humans when they are engaging in artistic creativity, in the field of music, for example. But I fundamentally disagree that AI can be (or make) a creative entity in its own right. Creativity is something that defines what it is to be human and has done so since the dawn of civilisation. To endow computers with qualities that are (or imitate) human life is to erode the very definitional fabric of humanity. It is a betrayal of humanity to give computers the ability to write ‘poems.’ A ‘poem’, written by a piece of software, is merely a digital product. AI is becoming more than a mere tool to be used by a creative individual – it is becoming a ‘collaborator’ in the creative process. If some reports are to be believed, it is becoming more than a collaborator. As one research paper put it, ‘ … creativity is not some mystical gift that is beyond scientific study but rather something that can be investigated, simulated, and harnessed for the good of society.’ ¹ When it becomes impossible to distinguish between what is produced by a computer and what by a human being, that is a betrayal of humanity. Making art is mystical and that is why it is valued. It is the author’s gift to culture and civilisation. It is mystical in that it is one individual bearing their soul and sharing experience of life. Sharing life with others, who also live, is part of what it means to be human and part of the mystery of life.

What it Means to be Human

In an earlier essay of mine, the question that stood out was – ‘What are we?’ ‘We’ being humans, the species of animals that have become dominant on the planet Earth. When humans have the power to create synthetic versions of themselves, powered by brains that emulate their intelligence, what we are is called into question. That power is now not far off. Not something that will be seen only in the distant future. The software that has been developed to augment the creative process, is now being given human shape or form. But, it is still simply a set of digital processes that are generated by machines in boxes. It is not difficult to imagine the eventual outcome of that process: that digital artistry will be given human form. Will humanoids come to challenge our greatest creative artists? Will we no longer be able to see or hear the difference between the work of a real human being and that of an animated machine? When a pianist plays a concerto or sonata by Beethoven (or any other great composer) what we hear is the soul of the pianist, as much as that of the composer. We hear Beethoven but we also hear the artist’s performance and interpretation of his work. They combine for our pleasure and admiration. Will people in the future admire the excellence of software designers combined with the immense skill of artifice in the creation of humanoid machines? What will it mean for our humanity if we are offered either real human experience and, or, artificial humanoid existence? Is there a sense in which both are equally meaningful and valid? I argue that they are not equally meaningful. One is human existence and the other is a digital product. If being human is to be valued above the outputs of machines, then we must hold fast to the principle of resisting the development of artificiality. We must value individuality based on human experience.

Individuality

Think of the great writers of the Western world: Austen, Conrad, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Eliot, Flaubert, Hemingway, Joyce, Orwell, Proust, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Voltaire, Wilde, Woolf … names that come most readily to my mind. They worked on their novels alone. It might have been, at the publishing stage, that others made contributions to the text but that does not detract from the fact that these are works of artistic individuality in which we feel the presence, as we read them, of another human being. Many of them wrote their manuscripts before the invention of the typewriter. Few of them (if any) wrote after the invention of the personal computer and word processing software.

There is more to reading one of these authors than simply the enjoyment of the text; we connect with the writer and get a sense of that artist as a person. We read the creations of a single individual. We are not consuming a product. It seems, from what I have read about literary group work, that one person might contribute to an aspect of the story while another works on different elements of it. This has led to the creation of what is called ‘commercial’ fiction. In that respect, it is a product. The idea that a work of fiction must be written by one individual has been called ‘antiquated.’ One source suggested that individual authorship of creative works is a fairly modern invention. I am not convinced how true that allegation is for writing but it was certainly true for paintings. In the past, works of art were often created by studios in which more than one artist was involved in the work. Paintings were often either finished or produced by younger artists who worked under the supervision of a great master. There are a great many paintings that have been attributed to great masters where it is thought they had not been completed solely by him.

I need to see evidence for the claim that novels were, in times gone by, the work of more than one writer. The novel has a long history in Western culture. Nearly all works, since the ‘invention’ of the novel, as an art form, have been the product of a single writer. Even if that writer was influenced by others, it was nevertheless a work of individual composition. Very early volumes might have been published under a pseudonym or after the death of the writer, but we still sense the presence of an artist and the world in which he or she lived. This changed with the growth of the mass publishing industry. The way books were written, in the near past, does not invalidate today’s method which is based largely on the work of a single person. The emergence of group writing is worrying but there is a far more serious threat facing the arts and that is what is happening with AI. The products of a group of creative artists are one thing; the manufacture of artificial art is another. So-called ‘art’ produced by machines is a dehumanising activity. Artificially-made art threatens the fundamentals of what it is to be human. Being human has involved creativity since the birth of civilisation.

The Power of Human Creativity

I might be old-fashioned. I might be behind the times. But I am a firm believer in the power of the creative process to shape lives. Shaping life is a human process. Robotics is blurring and confusing the boundaries between humanity and artificiality. Robotics and AI are challenging the very nature of what it is to be human. Artificiality undermines the reality of human existence by invalidating the one thing that makes us human – our individuality. Art is being reduced to the status of a consumable product. Its manufacturers think it is and want us, its consumers, to believe that it is. Art that is driven by profit regards us as consumers, there to be exploited for someone else’s gain. We should rebel against this trend and insist that art is something quintessentially human. Art is made by living human beings; it cannot be art if it is made by something that is not alive. It is merely a product if it owes its existence to a machine. If society allows artificially created works of art to become commonplace, that is a process which undermines and devalues the meaning of what it is to be human. The sure way to avoid this happening is for art lovers to refuse to consume the products of artificial intelligence. If nobody wants to purchase such things, their manufacture will wither on the vine.

This piece is not a thesis that states the ultimate repudiation of artificially created art. Far from it. It is more of a manifesto that sets out a position. It might set an agenda for further writing.

Footnotes

¹ From www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/articles/artificial-intelligence-and-the-arts-toward-computational-creativity/.