Γνῶθι σαυτόν

To this day, we have yet to prove the supernatural. If a thing exists, it is entirely possible to so thoroughly comprehend it that there are no remaining questions as to its nature. Men used to believe that gods lived atop Mount Olympus, that all matter was comprised of four elements, that eclipses were holy punishments, that witchcraft was a genuine threat, that disease was caused by the four humors being imbalanced, that time was objective, etc. All of these things and more now seem silly to us, as we are on the opposite end of a long journey of science and understanding. Of course, Zeus isn’t casting down lightning bolts – a child could tell you that these days! How silly they must have been all that time ago. They knew so little, while we know so much.

And yet, along with this understanding, necessarily comes the death of mystery and the unknown. Humans love to tell themselves stories, and those stories usually have some greater meaning or important moral. There’s a reason for everything. Macbeth was compelled by prophesy. Frodo was unwittingly doing the bidding of Eru Iluvatar. Anakin Skywalker was the chosen one. Since we first had words with which to speak, humans have been telling stories to each other that explain the world and its inhabitants as possessing some extraordinarily important qualities – it scratches some itch inside the mind.

Naturally, we carry this behavior over into the real world. To this day, if there is some doubt about a certain event or phenomenon, you will invariably find someone willing to tell you a fake story that forces things to make sense. It is far more comforting to believe that everything that occurs in the world has some greater purpose, and that you are therefore destined for greater things – there is something special about you. And yet, looking back on the old mythologies and witch stories, it is clear that their complexity and explanative power dwindles with the passing of time. This is due to our knowledge of the world growing and the mysteries dying off one by one. The unknown shrinks as the known grows.

This has led modern humans to have a bit of an identity crisis. If all we are is the sum of our parts, the inescapable result of countless biological mechanistic processes motivating our every action, what makes us special? Surely, there must be some further unknown aspect to us – something that is necessarily intangible and unobservable to modern science, but is nevertheless there. Of course, this is hardly a new question. The concept of the soul has been around for longer than organized religion. Of course, if we’re being perfectly honest, we know there is no such thing as a soul. Philosophical debates and religious discussions can be had until the participants are blue in the face, but a truthful biologist would never tell you that a soul is necessary for the human body to function as we currently understand it. So why is it that over the past two years, the word “soul” has been increasingly prevalent online in regards to discussions on AI art?

I believe the answer is both simple and tragic. A relatively well-informed person in 2022 would have been able to look at an image created by DALL·E 2 and easily determine that it wasn’t created by a human. They might not have been able to explain exactly what gave away the nature of the image, especially as more powerful models reared their heads later in the year, but it was still obvious to them. There was just something lacking in the illustrations and photographs created by these early models, which was quickly determined by the permanently online community of internet artists to be “soul”.

“Obviously,” they thought, “a machine could never produce true art – as art is the expression of life and the manifestation of an artist’s experiences! This could never be replicated, let alone understood, by a computer. This is soulless.” Looking back on the AI images of the day, it’s not impossible to understand why this was a common sentiment. It truly does seem that the models in 2022 were just missing something important. Of course, we have since discovered what they were missing: scale. It turns out that if you increase the size of the image models, along with various small improvements to training techniques, you can essentially eliminate the “soulless” aspect of the outputs. We aren’t quite at 100% yet, that will take just a bit longer, but gone are the days of “AI art will NEVER be perfect!” criticisms. Instead, we have taken to quibbling over tiny details that need to be zoomed in on just to be noticed. Where we were maybe 50% of the way to perfection in 2022, we are somewhere around 95% there today – the remaining gap will quickly be crossed.

When first confronted with machines that could make art, critics were quick to point to some intangible force within us that makes it impossible for AI to replicate our creations. That claim has since been proven incorrect, but that didn’t stop those same critics from predictably making identical claims about music, videos, and now even video games. Surely THIS time the models will run up against some law-of-nature barrier that prevents them from matching us in these domains. But, of course, this will not be the case. Over the coming years, this baseless claim will be proven wrong over and over again. But this begs the question, why do people keep saying this? Why does it seem like we need this to be true?

Over the past year or so, my internet friends and I have been paying attention to certain YouTubers that continuously make anti-AI content. Their videos almost always say the same things: this is illegal, there will be lawsuits, everyone who makes these models is going to jail, if you use these models you simply are out to make money, AI users will never be real artists, everything will go back to the way it was, you are special, please just wait a little while longer. Obviously, this would be most accurately described as “cope”, people desperately yelling at clouds and flailing their arms – hoping that if their rain dance works, everything can just be normal again. The individuals watching these videos want nothing more than for the videos to be correct, as evidenced by their credulous remarks that reliably flood the comment sections.

It’s fun to watch these videos, laugh at the people who make them and mock those who unironically consume them. But in a way, this almost misses the larger point. Even if they don’t recognize it themselves, the people who have been bandying about the “soulless” accusations for the past two years have all come to the same realization: if a thing exists, it is entirely possible to so thoroughly comprehend it that there are no remaining questions as to its nature. As the mysteries of the world have been whittled down, it has become harder and harder for us to claim importance and feel special.

For a while, it was assumed that artistic expression would be exclusively the domain of mankind. That there was something within us, from the days of scrawling stick figures on cave walls to the days of video games, which was necessary in order for a work of art to be meaningful, enjoyable, and soulful. This belief has been thoroughly demonstrated to be untrue, which is understandably heartbreaking for some. Yet one more thing taken from the realm of mystery and thoroughly quantified. But just as you are today perfectly comfortable with the understanding that Zeus truly is not atop Olympus, you will one day be similarly alright with the understanding that art itself is not special. There is no medium of expression that makes you uniquely important. Instead, it is what you do with the medium that matters.

Part of growing up is realizing this – that there is no magic in the world, that you must know your own limits. There is no Easter bunny, there is no tooth fairy, and there is no intangible soul in art. You must bring yourself to terms with this and realize that it’s all okay. The world of chess went through this in 1997, and yet people still play chess. You don’t have to be the best at something for it to be enjoyable. A thing doesn’t have to be unique for it to be important. The death of the unknown smiles at us all; and all we can do is smile back.

9/9/2024