I think about AI most days of the week, mostly because every piece of software I use now offers to rewrite, rewire and repurpose what I am sitting down to create. My response is always an impolite ‘no’! A further reason why AI crosses my mind on a daily basis is our current hive anxiety about it, a feeling in our culture that something is going to crumble, and that that old threadbare garment of meaning and human endeavour might finally unravel in the coming generation.
I’m not sure whether I sign up to the AIpocalypse or not; having survived the Millennium Bug in 1999 relatively unscathed I remain a little leery about embracing the certain doom of humanity when it comes to machines. I’m not even all that worried about AI when it comes to writing, music and art, because people of integrity will still continue to create with genre stripping imagination, whether or not an overheated server in California can pump out Picassos and Iliads at a formidable rate. To quote Larry from Throw Momma from the Train, ‘writers write, always’. No language model is going to materially affect that in the long run.
My biggest concern with AI so far is that it has put paid to my burgeoning cat meme habit. As far as vices go, I know this is a fairly low grade confession, but animals and humans doing funny things, incurring danger on themselves, or just acting according to kind are a source of solid entertainment for me. At the end of a day of reading, writing and editing there is something indulgent about watching felines emptying cereal containers over kitchen worktops, and DIY lumberjacks hanging prodigally from ill-pitched ladders. Dopamine served with a side order of schadenfreude is pretty heady stuff.
AI, however, is ruining this for me. Just last week as I reused a midnight green tea bag for the third time in my mug, I settled in to watch a couple (recorded by their Ring doorbell) returning from their dog walk who narrowly missed being crushed by a falling tree in their front garden. The incident was so close that the dog lead was trapped under the tree trunk. Just before I gasped, liked and shared, I noticed the word ‘Sora’ in the corner of the frame. AI had engineered this whole event, meaning no dogs or humans were within a country mile of being harmed by this production. Disappointing, to say the least.
The heart and art of happenstance
All of this spoiled frippery does carry something of a serious point about why AI simply won’t do in the long run. A cat dangling from a refrigerator door, a runaway snowboarder screaming ‘Earl!’ on his way past a fixed camera, and stage productions going embarrassingly wrong while being filmed appeal to us precisely because they ‘happened’. In a world where we put ever more measures in place to control our environment, we still need the carnival of things falling apart to engage us, entertain us, and, in a way that I don’t understand, reassure us. Any stage management or manipulation spoils everything, precisely because happenstance has been removed from the equation.
This speaks to something deep in us as humans: we don’t like sheer fatalism or determinism. Even those who share my Christian views about God’s sovereignty, occasionally retreat to compatibilism as a way of preserving the agency of human existence, and the horizontal contingency of living real lives with real choices. God might know the end from the beginning and ordain all things, but part of the spice and flavour of being human is that we don’t, nor do we need to compose a lengthy theological treatise to keep freewill free. We live, we make choices, we make mistakes, we over and under indulge, we opt for wrong paths, we rejoice in good decisions, and all of this has meaning at a fundamental level.
In the space where cat memes used to be, I want to embrace and celebrate the aesthetic of a happening world, an environment where I do not will my world into being but where there is agency and fluidity, scope and risk and resolution through the sheer reality of living. This imminence of lived experience, the heart skip possibility of what will come of things is a significant part of what it means to be human.
There’s something about Walcott’s eyes
A case study in the happening of life and art is Ross Wilson’s commissioned portrait of poet Derek Walcott. It is presently on display in the National Portrait Gallery in London (they commissioned the piece) on Floor 2, Room 28. This has long been a favourite painting of mine and in June this year I took some time away from my work in the city to pay it a visit. The painting is not available under Creative Commons, but you can view it on the National Portrait Gallery website here.
What strikes me about this piece is how unlikely it is. Wilson, a Northern Ireland artist, is commissioned by a London gallery, to paint a Saint Lucian poet. The piece itself is resplendent, and when viewed in person emanates something of the radiance of both the Caribbean and Walcott’s imagination. The poet is haloed in graded light, borderline silhouetted by the intensity of his background, the canvas almost suggesting the texture of the eye’s vascular surface, and out of this effusion it is the poet’s eyes that fix our attention.
While spending time with the painting in person I fell into conversation with the gallery attendant who told me that the painting is her favourite. ‘There’s just something about what the painter has done with the eyes that really fixes me’.
It is this something, this conscious and unconscious articulation of Wilson’s perspective, the long considered approach, the carefully executed final work, and the millions of micro-decisions that make this piece of art what it is, when it was, with what it offers. No determinative system could have devised a piece like this, no trawled repository of previous creations could have landed at this on aggregate, and even if it did by sheer luck, the humanity and agency of its subject and its creator would be howlingly absent. There really is just something about Walcott’s eyes, and Wilson’s eye.
The music of what happens
There are the mud-flowers of dialect And the immortelles of perfect pitch And that moment when the bird sings very close To the music of what happens.
This post has come a long way from cat memes and reused teabags, but whether we come at the theme on the basis of comedy or tragedy, AI can never be us, and its work can never carry the electrical current of coincidence. Art, poetry and song take place in the slight inflections, the directions and redirections of human stories, the disappointments and triumphs, the pathos and bathos of our lives’ unravelling timelines, in what Seamus Heaney called ‘the music of what happens’.
The whole trajectory of an artists’ lifespan, the assimilated experiences of childhood and adulthood, the rise and fall of affections, the weather that frames this particular day at the desk or the studio, the unnoticed but still absorbed birdsong that carols at the window, the ennui of time’s passage, the pressures of a school run before taking up the pen - all of this, its entirety and its unpredictability are what surface our souls when we consume good work. AI can’t get within a country mile of this because AI can’t happen - it is pure causation, disembodied conclusions that are hopelessly foregone, with no risk involved.
Louis MacNeice’s poem ‘Snow’ captures this in terms that cannot be pinned down by criticism, but that communicate the audacity, immediacy and contingency of a life lived and translated into art:
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was Spawning snow and pink roses against it Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: World is suddener than we fancy it. World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various. And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes— On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands— There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
A ‘suddener’ world, ‘the drunkenness of things being various’ is precisely what breaches the fatalistic and fatal outflow of language model charades; this life in its vivacity and unpredictability and danger. These things are discerned by the soul, felt (as Wordsworth so memorably phrased it) ‘along the heart’, and nothing merely human can account for them, nothing merely synthetic can produce them.
I will, for now, accept the pillage of my cat meme horde and find other means of unwinding my mind after a day of busyness, but in the bigger and deeper things, the heart-flow of true creativity, I harbour no fears. Only humans can get drunk on the intoxicating beauties and terror of ‘things being various’, and there isn’t an innovatoin on this earth that can alter that.