Why the surprise at the “hallucinations” of our dear & dreaded (1) Chat GPT? It has not been trained as a fact & source checking tool - it has been trained to build plausible sentences drawing upon all the texts from the web it could ingest – so of course it hallucinates. Indeed, humanity’s collective texts & images so often do. Across the ages we have used language and images to share lies, legends, fantasies – as much as true facts and knowledge or expressions of authentic feelings.
These bots that have become so good at generating texts and images – would they ever be able to also emulate those grander human hallucinations, which have brought such reassuring structure, beauty and consolation to so many humans (2)?
Such as : the religious hallucinations, purporting to offer us all the
metaphysics and ethics we need to get along and be happy in this world, if only we have the faith (and
are willing to ignore the lack of demonstrable, scientific truths). Or the artistic hallucinations, bringing an
illusion of transcendent beauty and meaning, answering our longing for harmony
and sense, our need for consolation & redemption - exploiting our willingness
to temporarily suspend our disbelief (for the time of our blissful listening to
the composition (3), of our looking at the painting, of our reading the poem).
It's
tempting to speculate on the new era for
art that may be ushered in by Chat GPT.
Humanity has
known eras of transcendent art - be it as a pursuit of reproducing the harmony
of the spheres or at the service of religion. Eras of high art meeting the
demands of wealthy and cultivated patrons (aggrandizing those patrons’ deeds or indulging their emotional
tribulations or just offering quality entertainment & decorations). Eras of
art which managed to be both sublime (mathematically or even divinely) and
movingly human.
We have had
an era of mass culture driven by commercial success and mass reproducibility.
We have had algorithms spying upon us all and selecting an offer which so
perfectly matches our needs that we get
hooked and sell our attention for free to the advertising industry.
In the era
of the generative pre-trained bots, shall we now all become like the wealthy
patrons of yore – able to order new works of art (a composition, a poem, an
image) which are made to fit our specifications of subject, style, mood etc. All
we need to do is to compose a “prompt” –
and an artificial intelligence can spit out new personalised creations, in
endless variations on what we humans have produced before.
Why does
that sound depressing? Because it is a farce if art is not made by an artist
sharing our human condition, an artist with empathy who thoughtfully
accompanies us in our quest for expression,
beauty, meaning and consolation. The era
of the bot- generated art would be yet another stage in our fall from
grace - a humanity hooked to an
automaton which without emotion or involvement produces mindless variations (4)
based on statistics and borrowed human pathos.
Reflective Notes & Quotes
(1) ‘Dear’ – a fascinating black box we all love to play with, wondering which unfathomable progress may lie ahead ; ‘Dreaded’ – as a parody of our touted unique language skills - a mindless ransacking of our collective memory
(2) Readers can eaaily complete the principal adverse impacts of these grand hallucinations
(3) On the subject of blissful listening and redemption, let’s quote an old Bach-lover ( André Tubeuf in « Bach, ou le meilleur des monde », p172) : « Notre péché (originel) et notre salut (racheté) : tout le Bach des Cantates se joue en cela. Et dans le timbre d’alto […] de tous le plus pleinement humain. Stigmates compris »
(4) « les variantes hallucinées […] [des] grandes oeuvres méditatives laissent percer un sentiment d’universel dérision. » . How apt, Yves Bonnefoy’s insightful assessment of Picasso’s works without human presence or dignity (“et c’est évidemment pour cela qu’iI a fasciné son siècle”) : from 20th century abstract art to our 21st century fascination for art generated by artificial intelligence
