Why AI Cannot Replace Artists

Tractatus Technico-Aestheticus

“i think this is gonna be more like the renaissance than the industrial revolution,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said about its flagship product, ChatGPT. Over the last few years this AI software has spread virus-like across the globe, swallowing up inane tasks like writing student essays and helping corporate workers with operations and strategy. But its long-term promise is that it will refashion the arts from the ground up.

Altman had previously said that AI will enable “anyone” to create “amazing art,” which will be a “downside for most individual artists” but will unleash “totally new kinds of art.” “The skill that will matter will be imagination,” Altman said triumphantly. On a different occasion, he lauded Chat’s ability to write fiction: “we trained a new model that is good at creative writing […] this is the first time i have been really struck by something written by AI; it got the vibe of metafiction so right.” He recently exalted its ability to spit out a pseudo-Cartesian philosophical blurb.

And, ever the obedient freelance marketers, the streamers and commentator-parrots have already rung the death knell of the artist in the face of these alleged achievements. “If you are an artist, this has been a really bad week for you… I wanna promise you that it’s going to get worse... go be a plumber or something,” the wise Asmongold said the other week in response to an AI’s Ghibli-style rendition of The Lord of the Rings.

I would like to submit a counterargument. I will not quibble about the “quality” of AI art, neither in its current state nor in its likely far-advanced future. I will go for the kill: my contention is that human art is in its essence something wholly other than the essence of AI “art,” and that the two things are categorically different—in fact opposite—no matter how similar they may end up looking. I have written out the argument in an analytic fashion, a “Tractatus Technico-Aestheticus,” curated to the taste of the technocrat. It contains no “arguments” as such, but only declarative statements, which aim to draw a limit to the scope of art within language. Its intention is not to provide an original conception of art, but to hone in on what we mean by “art” through analysis—it thus includes no sources, although it draws in part from some famous philosophers and art critics whose names have been suppressed to avoid appealing to authority. Its meaning can be summed up somewhat as follows: art has an origin which machines cannot understand, and thus the creative products of artificial intelligence cannot be called art.

1. The beautiful is that which, when apprehended, pleases.

1.1 The beautiful can by definition include what is commonly called ugly if it is arranged in a pleasurable way.

1.11 Thus “pleasure” here cannot be taken solely in a positive way, denoting gain or possession.

1.12 Beauty can invoke deprivation—the negative—in the tragic and fearful.

1.121 Beauty can also invoke possession in a manner that is not nobly edifying but playfully humiliating; this is called humor.

1.13 Whatever the work of art is in its essence, it must at least include the intentional arrangement of sensible or intelligible matter toward beautiful ends.

1.131 Thus the mark of whether a product is “a work of art” cannot lie in whether it presents one type of content or sensuous data, but in the status of its arrangement: whether the arrangement is proper, or not.

1.2 To “please,” to enact a moment of beauty in a work, is to arrange sensible or intelligible materials toward a proper formation with the intent to uplift, purge, or result in splendor.

1.21 “Proper” comes from the Latin propius, meaning that which is natural to one, according to their nature; that which belongs to one, that which is one’s own, with linguistic connotations of “concrete” and “specific.”

1.3 We can give a rough and general overview of what constitutes a “proper arrangement” by dividing the analytical reception of it into three dimensions. The beautiful occurs in the bringing out of the integritas, consonantia, and claritas of a person, place, thing, or action.

1.31 Integritas means wholeness. In the context of art, it is the first stage of perception, where we behold the isolated thing, one and whole, apart from the noise. It is distinction, focus, the taking up, raising up, of the material; the natural tendency to single out what is significant, what is being presented as significant by the other.

1.32 Consonantia means harmony, the proportion that is due—when the isolated thing is examined and its multifarious parts prove to converge in ways that are fit with each other and with the whole. It is the knowledge of when to stop: no more, no less. It is the natural point of completion.

1.33 Claritas is the idiosyncratic essence of a singular thing. While integritas is the one, and consonantia the many, claritas is the particular, the synthesis of one and many into a specific thing. The specificity is registered by the mind as a radiant quiditas, whatness, the aura that makes it that thing and no thing else, its original peculiarity, the nature of its nature.

1.4 Because these dimensions analyze what is proper to a being, the source of these dimensions is in the very beingness or essence of a being, not in anything extraneous or ontical, nor in anything empirical or ideal.

2. The being that is to apprehend what is proper, having truck with these dimensions, is the human being, because they can verbally raise the question of what is proper and grasp claims concerning what is proper.

2.1 The human being is therefore that being that can apprehend the beautiful.

2.11 These dimensions of apprehension cannot be taught, but proceed from the human ability to detect essential being prior to sensible or ideal categorization.

2.11 A non-human entity, e.g. a machine, can only be programmed with the categories of judgment and made to reflect on things already discovered and excavated by humanity; it cannot learn them anymore than it can have an instinct outside the scope of the recitation of factual knowledge.

2.12 The human being therefore has a pre-categorial intuition that can detect beings and recognize their integrity, harmony, and luminosity (corresponding to the understanding’s perception, recognition, and satisfaction).

2.121 The human being is able to interface with these dimensions insofar as they have experience with the contemplation of what is proper.

2.13 That activity which is proper to a thing can be called its authentic behavior. [The relationship between these notions in German is made more clear: eigentlichkeit (n.), authenticity; eigentlich (adv.), actual, proper; eigen (adj.), own, not shared, characteristic, specific; and das eigene, one’s own.]

2.131 Something is authentic, has come into its own, if it is attuned to its essential standing (cf. 1.21 and 1.4).

2.132 The fundamental way that the human being grasps the world, and the way the human reveals itself to itself, is through mood-attunement (in German this is one word, stimmung).

2.1321 For the human being, to take notice of the proper or improper status of an activity or an arrangement is to be attuned to and to be aware of its mood.

2.133 Mood is a variation of Being that is disclosed prior to all forms of cognition and encompasses a range of disclosure that exceeds them. We have moods before we wonder about the source or reasons behind them. Our first-person embodied reality is prior to all scientific knowledge and metaphysical reasoning.

2.134 Mood is therefore not a transcendental—like the True, Good, and Beautiful—but an “existentiale.” It is rooted in our being there in a place, in everyday reality, not in a conceptual schema like the forms and the categories.

2.1341 Mood is an existential instinct; entities that do not possess being-there cannot lay claim to it. An existentiale is a fundament of the human’s toolset for analyzing being. It occurs before we enter into any kind of rationalization or categorization; mood-attunement discloses what matters to us.

2.1342 Existentiales cannot be experienced by a machine, but transcendentals can, because they are Ideas reached through a logical unfolding along a dialectical method, which begins with the analysis of words and ends with a prognostic defining of value based on established parameters. Transcendentals are the end-points of logical circuits, but existentiales are the very mental blood of beings that live and die.

2.14 The apprehension of the authenticity of a thing must not be conducted through concepts (cf. 1.4) but through mood-attunement, which drills down into the sense for the proper, informed by its proximity to the question of Being.

2.15 The verbalization of mood-attunement is the raising of the question of Being; through it, the essential standing of all things can be revealed.

2.151 The question of Being is the task of defining it. But Being resists all transcendental or universalist modes of definition (“Being is…” won’t do because it is tautological). The question of Being can only be answered—and asked—with existential analytic. The being capable of analyzing existentiales is the human being.

2.1511 The human being, as a being that will die, has its essential standing in the apprehension of its own mortality.

2.15111 The memento mori is the essential standing of the human being, and when the human being is fully cognizant of the fact that they will die they are able to speak authentically.

2.151111 All matters of authenticity are conditioned by the fact of death.

2.152 If the human being can ask the question of Being solely because they are capable of cognizing their own finitude, which is a matter of temporality, then the question of being is asked through the horizon of time.

2.2 The artwork is the human being putting its essential standing into the open; in this way it is a moment of Truth, which the Greeks properly termed ἀλήθεια, unconcealment. In doing this, the human being undergoes an ecstasy (ek-stasis), standing out of themselves and witnessing their own essential standing, which as finite beings invariably occurs in time.

2.21 The analysis and the execution of the dimensions of the proper arrangement of sensible or intelligible matter (art) can only be carried out while keeping the fact of death in view, by an entity that will die and that knows and accepts it will die.

2.3 The authentic realization of the fact of death (finitude), as a matter of temporality, means that artworks and their qualitative dimensions are inherently bound up with the notion of Time, not as measurable duration but as lived moments as they pass, leading towards oblivion, by the human being who is aware of this fact.

2.4 Aesthetics and art are not the same.

2.41 Aesthetics and art differ along ontological lines.

2.42 Aesthetics, from αἴσθησῐς meaning sense perception, considers art from the point of view of the subjective spectator rather than the creative artist.

2.421 As a metaphysical doctrine, Aesthetics holds that the work of art is the representation or instantiation of an Idea, sometimes with numinous connotations, in sensuous form.

2.4211 Empiricism is a form of idealism because it analyzes from a posited idealist subject. The ideal subject represents universals using particulars to communicate what it perceives to be absolute knowledge.

2.42111 Aesthetics as sensory subjective experience is idealist.

2.422 The nature of an Idea is to inform action: this-for-that, in-order-to. It is instrumental in that it aims to operate the behavior of humans toward certain valued ends, usually identified as beneficial for society or some other goal by the artist or philosopher.

2.423 The arrangement of sensible or intelligible matter toward such ends is properly called technical mimesis: we see the grasping of concept, a universal signifier, and the craftsman encoding it in a device that depicts the idea or houses it in a metaphoric vehicle.

2.4231 Allegory is idealistic analysis, it is not existential. It is not timeless and it is not ecstatic (cf. 2.2 and 2.3).

2.424 By contrast, the existential nature of a thing, its explicitness, obtrusively shows up when it breaks down, when it becomes inoperative and ruins the flow of this-for-that.

2.4241 An existentiale can be thought of as a primordial mode of apprehension that reminds us of place and our conscious presence (cf. 2.1341 and 2.2). As such, the work of an existential being is an in-itself, rather than a this-for-that.

2.43 As opposed to aesthetics, art in its proper home or origin, and not in any strange practice to which its name has been dragged. considers the work from its proximity to the site of the disclosure of essential existentiality, i.e. Truth (cf. 2.2).

2.431 Artworks created by humans are encoded with awareness of essence; even if a human uses AI to create “art,” the alien essence of technology will take over and the product will be devoid of this. (Think of Titian’s brushstrokes, the presence of Beethoven’s deafness in his late works, the agony of Michelangelo’s body hanging from the ceiling as he painted the Sistine Chapel, or the autobiographical material upon which all great authors draw.)

2.432 Truth, as an unmasking, is always a dialogue with the ultimate unmasking of life, i.e. death.

2.4321 An artwork, as opposed to an aesthetic object, is a meditation by a human being for human beings on the fact of death; and it is beautiful if it pleases, if it accepts the conditions of the finite (corresponding to the dimensional formality of integritas, consonantia, and claritas). On the other hand, an aesthetic object is an argument for an action of social, organizational, etc. improvement.

2.43211 While the human being has there-being, the machine has it-being.

2.4322 Since the locus of difference is in time, the major difference in effect is the absence of memories, the inexperience with personal time, meaningful time (history), “quality time,” and the preoccupation with mortality. The machine is spiritually immortal.

2.5 In terms of motion, art arrests us, fixes us, while aesthetics drags us to desire or loathe something.

2.51 The archetypal modes of aesthetics then are propaganda, pornography, and advertisements.

2.6 Since artificial intelligence lacks access to the pre-categorial existentiales (the question of the meaning of being rather than an endless series of computational “hows”), its sensuous designs cannot be called artworks, but aesthetic objects.

2.61 An aesthetic object’s ontological activity is to de-essentialize the world by enframing it through logic and offering “solutions” within it according to principles. An artwork’s activity is to draw out the inner essences of things into language and orientate the human animal to them, and thus orientate it to Being—the fact of its mortality.

2.62 The aesthetic object corresponds to hubris; the artwork corresponds to humility, gratitude, or worship.

2.7 An aesthetic object, grasped in its temporal content, is oriented entirely toward the past; it is nostalgic, like kitsch. It derives devices and tropes from past human art and fetishizes them or mobilizes them toward its designatory end.

2.71 AI art therefore is aesthetical troping devoid of existential content. But such content is the very marrow of art.

2.8 The artwork holds open the past, present, and future, allowing them to flow into each other while standing back in a fourth realm of the open. We call this ἐποχή.

2.81 The artwork both bears witness to Timelessness and to the perpetual flow of human becoming (history) (cf. 2.2 and 2.3).

2.9 The aesthetic object, because it is not existential, does not know Time, and thus cannot reflect on death, and thus cannot accept death.

2.91 The inability to accept death is nihilism.

2.911 The triumph of nihilism would remove all conditions.

2.92 The desire to remove all conditions and unleash boundless caprice inexorably tends toward malevolency; this desire is evil.

2.93 The conscious spreading of nihilism is evil.

3. AI is definitionally incapable of creating art.

3.1 AI can only create aesthetic objects, mobilizing transcendentals, universal signifiers, to build arguments in a this-for-that fashion. As technology, it is instrumentalist in its essence.

3.11 Technology developers and capitalistic chief executive officers who insist otherwise only reveal their alienation from the human as such.

3.12 This is evident in their self-admitted refusal to accept the mortal status of the human animal and their fascination with the supersession of the human species by “superintelligent” technology.

3.13 But, by definition, their inventions cannot supersede human intelligence because they only have access to enframed computation, and do not have access to the full range of existential sensitivity.

3.14 The aesthetic object, shorn of grounding particulars and mortality-reminding meditations, is nihilistic, and those who wish to replace the human being and its time-stopping-and-comprehending artwork with the supercomputer’s infinite regress of mimetic propositions—solely capable of responding to the world with a will that wills will whose only answer can be an in-order-to, is a wish to inflict nihilism on the species, and are thus evil.

Quod erat demonstrandum.