The Mona Lisa and Machines

A psychological theory for why we don’t take AI as seriously as we should

The artistic machines are coming. Artificial intelligence is already starting to upend deep assumptions about the indispensability of human input in the diverse areas like journalism, archaeology, writing, and even musical composition. Although a lot of this technology is still in its infancy, there doesn’t seem to be any real limitation in principle to the extent to which machines could take over in these domains, at least in the long run.

In a 2005 piece for the Atlantic, Bloom summarizes a fascinating theory of two distinct ways humans categorize objects in the world:

From this difference arises two distinct domains of objects — the physical and the social — with their own interior logic and expectations. While both these domains are descriptions of the same world, they operate in non-overlapping ways:

For instance, if you can’t tell human-made artifacts from machine-made, the social origins would simply matter less in any marketplace where the merits of the physical aspects is an independent metric of its value. After all, given time, AI might even start composing music (say) that exceed in quality that which has human creators. At that point, the dominance of the social aspects in gate-keeping what is considered art will wither away slowly, as more and more people realize that their hangup over origins is keeping them away from superior art.

This isn’t to say that machine-made artifacts would necessarily be embraced rapidly or by everyone, but it has to be conceded that the distinction between the physical and social we currently rely on tacitly in privileging human-made art, and the consequent dismissal of the possibility of machines making inroads into the human world of creativity, is far shakier than we might think.

To come back to where we started, I still have a visceral sense that the richness of human art and creativity simply cannot be replicated by non-human machines, it’s just hard-wired into our brains. But I’ve come to realize that this feeling shouldn’t be counted on.

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