There’s a phenomenon you’ll see a lot of on Instagram: a talented artist posting a video of herself working on a magnificent piece she’s been hammering away on for weeks. Then someone in the comments will say, “Whatever, no big deal, she could’ve done that with AI in thirty seconds.”
Consider the fact that ChatGPT passed a version of the Turing Test a few months ago, and it’s clear why someone would say that.
The technology exists and the output may even look similar. So why spend years learning how to paint a Parisian atelier when you can just type in a few prompts on a computer?
But is that not missing the point? What makes art interesting is not the marks on the canvas, but the inner world of the artist that is revealed by the marks. The work of art is just a tool to bring out the latter. And AI, clever as it is, has no inner life.
This is what the trolls in the comments fail to grasp. Motivation is complex, human beings, even more so. We are multi-layered and multivariate creatures. Rarely are our motives singular, or our intentions simple. As the old saying goes: “We contain multitudes.”
When it comes to work, of any kind, it’s a mistake to assume that all our motives are the obvious ones: money, security, survival. The bottom levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Watch anyone actually engaged in their work for a while and you’ll see that the motives span the pyramid. What the earnest workers are reaching for is belonging, self-esteem, self-actualization, and ultimately meaning.
We work because we have to survive, and we also work for the fun of it. To experience the joy of getting better. For the thrill of seeing our ideas become reality.
The purpose of great art, great literature, great comedy, or even the more mundane: a great economic treatise, a great white paper, is not found only in the act of consuming it. It is found in the act of producing it – in the process of painting, composing, writing, joking, thinking.
The end product isn’t the only thing that matters. Often, the process is the point.
The glittering lure of AI has always been that it will shortcut the process.
But the painter doesn’t have to have the painting. The end product is just a souvenir in many ways. The journey is what she came for. When the journey is the point – when you’re trying to become something through the process and create something that impacts people in lasting ways – the shortcuts becomes a problem.
We can’t delegate the journey long and still arrive somewhere meaningful. The product matters but if we skip the process, we’re just selling trinkets.
