In the maze of thoughts ... Technology has no soul. Can you even give it one?

One could say that a piece of art is a window to the creator’s mind. Their thoughts, their soul. Which leads to the idea that through an act of art, the creator decided to share part their soul with everyone.

This isn’t a quote but it is indeed a thought, provoked by the recent events and supported by a bit of retrospective. It’s also because I stumbled upon an article about some dipshit pitching AI music but that’s not my main motivation despite some braincells commiting suicide just when reading the stupid headline. The thought I wish to ponder today is why is everything technological so “cold” and why we seek art in any form, no matter how weird it may seem at the first glance.

First, a little excerpt from a book some of you may know, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole. I’ve got is as an audiobook and in one chapter, where Adrian is talking about his future, his dad is trying to get him into a programming field. To this, Adrian responds with: “I want to do a job which has a soul. Computers have no soul.” And he’s quite right. Computers, or machines in general, have no soul of their own. They’re incapable of doing anything if not instructed to. They’re incapable of creating just on their own will. They mimic one’s actions based on the creator’s or instructor’s imprint.

Imprint … an intersting term in this context, isn’t it? When thinking about it, I get reminded of another piece of art, this time a game. In fact, one of my favourite game franchises, Mass Effect. In the universe of the franchise, a development of AI, as in an actual AI, is forbidden (probably because someone tried to make AI-controlled slave race only to be forced out of their own homeworld). However, a development and deployment of VI, Virtual Intelligence, is completely normal. What is a VI? A technology, comnbining the ability to process, search and interpret information for the user by processing and interpretting communication via natural language. Said technology can be further “personified” by providing a humanoid avatar to provide “face” and a “personality imprint” to match a personality of its creator or chosen person. Does the description sound familiar? Does it remind you of today’s “AI”? Pattern, image and voice recognition, language model capable of interpretting naturally formulated instructions and retaining context … the only things that are missing are the avatar, which can be made and the personality imprint.

And it’s the last ingredient that’s the problematic one. Because what is a personality? One’s manners? How they present themselves? Their views? Biases? … The answer is all of them and … their soul. You’d have to literally “copy” one’s essence of being into a machine to create a true AI. Fun fact, the Mass Effect games mentioned before have this as one of their core themes, put in front in the third game. It also explain why no matter how much some want to try, they’ll never achieve more than creating a small piece of a being, simluated by cold logic and accumulated knowledge which is then statistically interpreted to provide the most probable outcome. But is that outcome an actual choice? If so, why? How did it reach the outcome? What was it motivated by? What desires? Were the desires its own or were they just someone else’s desires, imprinted into the circuitery?

Let’s just look at the relatively simple example which is indeed interpreting and using whatever knowledge a machine can have. For this purpose, let me establish a simple evaluation criterion consisting of three yes/no attributes:

Now, let’s take any present day computer capable of working with an AI model and let’s ask the critical questions:

Is it knowledgable? Yes. A computer capable of performing an automated search and filtering does in fact poesses knowledge required to perform a given task. In theory, this can be any task.

Is it intelligent? Depends. On what, you ask? On whose intelligence was its own modeled after. Because even if the learning process was not supervised, the method was already pre-determined by the creator of said method. Long story short, it was already taught what’s the “correct” path to take and the machine just needs to “figure out” how to reach the desired goal. And even then, the intelligence is debatable because it may still not be capable to satify the intended set of tasks fully, if at all.

Is it wise? No. And in my opinion, this degree is impossible to achieve because not even we, the humans who created the machines, can answer this question defnitely. Why? Because wise depends on context. It depends on a situation. Wisdom is a trait gained and honed by one’s experiences. It develops with what we see, hear, feel and how we interact with those around us. But machine cannot experience. It can’t do any of these on its own. It can, at best, mimic someone else’s experience.

In the end, the above example can be summed up in a statement: “AI knows but AI doesn’t understand.”

But I’ve started this post in regards to art. So how does this relate to it? Well, look at any “AI art”. Or even better, take an image you drew and try and find a similar image created by an AI. How do they make you feel? Does your creation evoke some emotions? What are they? Is it joy that you’ve created part of your inner world or your self-image? Motivation to improve and foster your hobby or potentially make a living out of it? Grief if the art reminds you of something or someone you’ve lost? Each of these are fueled by the fact that you, the creator, put these into the result. Each stroke of the pen, traditional of digital, each colour, they’re reflection of yourself, immortalised on the medium of your choice.

Now do the same with the AI image. It may look well-made but is there an emotion? Does it evoke something? Or is it just empty? If there’s a character in the picture, do they look welcoming? Terrifying? Or just bland and uncanny? If so, why? I’ll leave this answer to you, my dear reader.

The example above is why we seek art. And by that I mean genuine art. To provoke emotions, to feed our souls and humanity (not in the Dark Souls sense :p). It is why we look at technology as “cold” because it drains us of the above and no amount of trying to make it more “human” will make a difference. Why? Because those who try have no soul to give in the first place. And the people who do have already found a way to share theirs.

R.R.A.