Ted Chiang with a thought-provoking essay on “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art:”

It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.

In the past few years, Chiang has written and talked often about the limitations of LLMs. I can’t help but wonder how his views and thoughts regarding LLMs may one day affect his future fiction.

Matteo Wong, writing at The Atlantic, disagrees.

There are all sorts of reasons to criticize generative AI—the technology’s environmental footprint, gross biases, job displacement, easy creation of misinformation and nonconsensual sexual images, to name a few—but Chiang is arguing on purely creative and aesthetic grounds. Although he isn’t valuing some types of work or occupations over others, his logic leads there: Staking a defense of human labor and outputs, and human ownership of that labor and those outputs, on AI being “just” vapid statistics implies the jobs AI does replace might also be “just” vapid statistics. Defending human labor from AI should not be conflated with adjudicating the technology’s artistic merit. The Jacquard loom, despite its use as a creative tool, was invented to speed up and automate skilled weaving. The widespread job displacement and economic upheaval it caused mattered regardless of whether it was replacing or augmenting artistic, artisanal, or industrial work.

Chiang’s essay, in a sense, frames art not just as a final object but also as a process. “The fact that you’re the one who is saying it,” he writes, “the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes [art] new.” I agree, and would go a step further: The processes through which art arises are not limited and cannot be delimited by a single artist or viewer but involve societies and industries and, yes, technologies. Surely, humans are creative enough to make and even desire a space for generative AI in that.