Can AI Create Art?

Can AI Create Art?

Can AI have perceptions? Beliefs? Can rational thought penetrate the world the way we know it? Is there something essential in human cognition that is inaccessible to AI?

There is a rather well-know tweet from the Open AI CEO, Sam Altman—i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u. Stochastic means “randomly determined,” a probabilistic squawk. To call an AI a stochastic parrot is not derogatory. It is simply factual. It is how they work. Matrices and probabilities. So the question is:

Are our words and our thoughts randomly determined? Did Gabriel Garcia Marquez randomly put one word in front of another and create a few masterpieces? Are Van Gough’s brushstrokes expressions of something deep that has meaning or merely the random process of a mind, albeit slightly deranged?

Penrose, in his Shadows of the Mind calls AI intelligence (intending “human-like” intelligence) counterfeit understanding. “To have original thoughts requires consciousness which occurs only in human brains. It cannot manifest itself in other physical systems.” Can we agree that we can have semi-original thoughts when creating or inventing? At least some of us so. 

So can AI create art?

AI thinks with the mathematics we have invented. Unless it can arrive at truths beyond mere logic it cannot possess the basic qualities of ‘understanding.” Gödel proved that all truths are manufactured, made up by the human mind. There is no mathematical system that is purely logical or complete. Gödel’s brilliance was to use logic against itself to prove its limitations. By doing that Gödel showed how limitless the human mind was. And, perhaps, on the flip side the limits of computational models. He proved that human insight can never be reduced to a mere set of rules.

The input-output process of large-language models, despite recent “amazing” methods, is language. Just words. When we hear neural network we assume something that works like our minds, an artificial limbic system with an imperfect and emotional memory like our hippocampus, fear and loathing stored in its amygdala. That is not true. LLMs have tremendous processing power and speed but they are nothing like our brains.

They’re like airplanes, many many times faster than a bird, but can a plane land in a gutter or dive 60 feet into an ocean?