Humanity is not Negotiable

 

In the time that I've been writing this blog, I have promised myself to never use artificial intelligence to write it in any capacity.  Not to write, not to research, not to sketch outlines, not to workshop, and not to generate mediocre images.  (The reason I use so much classical art on this blog isn't to be pretentious, it's because that way I can at least trust that it's human.)  This rule has expanded to every other aspect of my life.  I don't use AI for school, for work, for my personal programming projects, or for any other purpose.

All of the thoughts on this website are free-range, organic human thoughts.

A year ago in my Environmental Ethics class, the professor once asked us to imagine nature as virtual reality.  In a class full of nature lovers, he asked if we would be satisfied to be submerged in some kind of matrix-like simulation of nature.  Students raised objections, such as that a simulation could never capture the sunlight shimmering through the summer trees or the scent of a pine tree.  The professor urged us to imagine, for the sake of argument, that the simulation could do such a thing.  A perfect imitation with no way to know the difference.

My response was that for as long as I could not tell that the simulation was a simulation, I would appreciate it as if it were nature.  But if the illusion was ever broken even for a moment, if I was ever told the truth, I would never be satisfied with a false nature.  All of my memories living within it would be forever poisoned, and I would seek to leave as soon as possible.  The professor asked me why, and I replied that consciousness (or spirit) was the distinction.

Consciousness is a difficult topic that will be dealt with on this blog in greater depth in the future.  But for now it is sufficient to note that I do not subscribe to materialist theories of consciousness.  Not only on religious grounds, but on philosophical grounds.  My position on the subject is closest to a kind of metaphysical idealism or panpsychism.  That background deeply colors my position on AI.  I do not believe that machine consciousness is possible because I suspect that mind, spirit, life, and biology are deeply intertwined.

Back to the topic of a false nature.  For me, the beauty of nature is not solely derived from a pretty picture or a breath of fresh air.  It is from a feeling of interconnection that is unmatched in artificial environments.  On my nature walks, the simple squirrel or deer is imbued with a kind of magic that endures.  The fact that the animal has its own inner world, an eye that sees me, a mind that thinks.  It's a miracle.  The herbs and the trees are no exception.  They have their own kind of vegetable life, reaching toward the sun, bringing forth growth and seeds and brambles and leaves, feeding the animals, building the soil, shading and holding me.  And if you pay attention to plants, you'll know that there's something going on in there, that they're not just dead matter.  Even the stones might sing on the right day.  Mind is spread out all over nature far broader than we conceive, and nature has a majesty and divinity far greater than the sum of its parts.

Compared to an authentic nature, a simulated one is worthless, no matter how convincing.  When the animals and plants and stones and rivers are just switches flipping in chips with neither mind nor will, where the sunlight is a graphical program that nourishes nothing, there is no miracle.  Every tree would become a smokestack and the sky would become the ceiling of a prison cell no matter how beautiful it would otherwise have been.

I tell this story of a false nature because it illustrates the difference between real art and AI-spewed trash.

I once heard a funny quip on an odd corner of the internet.  Someone remarked that AI forced them to believe in the human soul by showing them what art looks like without it.  I chuckled and groaned.  In the face of that sacrilege, the mind can intuit the dignity of man, that he is matter and yet also sacred fire.

Art is not just valuable because it appeals to some aesthetic sense.  Art is valuable because of the artist.  The fact that a real human had a human experience like mine, grappled with it, struggled, and managed to transmute it into something beautiful is what gives art meaning.  No matter how tightly AI simulates human art, it will never actually be able to produce an authentic artwork, because AI will never have experience of any kind, let alone a human one.  Even the simple text prompt that a human puts into an AI is more of a work of art than the image vomited out by the algorithm could ever be.

People who don't care whether an artwork is made by a human or not are giving something away about themselves.  They are showing that they never valued humanity or the human experience.  They only value the surface-level aesthetics of what they're looking at.  It's a self-own of epic proportions, and it's scary how many people never cared about humanity in the first place.  They were only unmasked when the inhuman began to walk among us.

If creating an idol is a crime against God, then creating AI is a crime against humanity.  AI was created through the outright theft of the products of human creativity with the goal of providing the rich with a way to mass-produce the products of the human mind without having to pay humanity its due for its service.  It's a crime against human dignity.

That is my stance on AI, and I'll die on this hill.

For the people reading, I implore you to not use AI, and to use your discernment to the best of your ability to not consume AI-generated media and products.  (This might mean quitting your favorite slop media sites.)  Using AI may be convenient for cheesing schoolwork but you are only robbing yourself of the skills and knowledge that you could have had if you didn't outsource your mind to the carbon-belching, water-guzzling plagiarism machine.  Being human is inconvenient.  But it's worth it.  And to me, humanity is not negotiable.