Is AI creative?

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0:00:38 What is the relationship between creativity and intelligence?
0:00:43 That’s a fundamental, perhaps unanswerable question.
0:00:46 Is it also an obsolete one?
0:00:47 The question now seems to be,
0:00:53 what is the relationship between creativity and artificial intelligence?
0:00:57 Creativity feels innately human.
0:00:59 But what if it’s not?
0:01:02 How are we to know?
0:01:07 Philosophers, artists, and scientists are already debating whether the art
0:01:11 and the writing generated by mid-journey and chat GPT
0:01:15 are examples of machines being creative.
0:01:21 But should the focus be on the output, the art that’s generated,
0:01:24 or the input, the inspiration,
0:01:29 and all the work and toiling that goes into making it?
0:01:34 And what about the other, smaller ways in which we use our creativity?
0:01:38 Like in a prank on a friend or in a note to a loved one.
0:01:46 Does the value of those communications change if AI creates them?
0:01:48 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:05 Today’s guest is writer and essayist Megan O’Giblin.
0:02:09 She’s the author of the book “God, Human, Animal, Machine.”
0:02:13 Technology, metaphor, and the search for meaning.
0:02:15 She’s also a previous guest of The Gray Area,
0:02:17 and if you enjoy this conversation,
0:02:24 and of course you will, I’ll add a link to our last one in the show notes.
0:02:29 Megan is terrific, and she’s been thinking about the human relationship
0:02:32 with technology for a long time.
0:02:37 And her book made a really strong case that the more our existence
0:02:40 intertwines with the tools we create,
0:02:47 the more those tools shape our understanding of who and what we are.
0:02:51 So as we kick off this series about creativity,
0:02:54 I could think of no better person to discuss how machines are changing
0:02:59 our understanding of creativity and forcing us to reflect
0:03:02 on what it really means to be creative.
0:03:12 Megan O’Giblin, welcome back to the show.
0:03:13 Thanks so much for having me.
0:03:15 So we’ve talked before.
0:03:18 You know what, I’m just going to go ahead and say we’re friends.
0:03:19 I hope that’s okay.
0:03:21 Yes.
0:03:27 So your work spans a pretty wide range of themes and questions connected
0:03:31 to the relationship between humans and computers.
0:03:37 What I wanted to talk with you today is about this relationship
0:03:43 or how to look at that relationship through the lens of creativity.
0:03:50 And you once asked a computer scientist what he thought creativity meant.
0:03:53 And he told you, well, that’s easy.
0:03:57 It’s just randomness.
0:04:01 What do you make of that view of creativity?
0:04:04 How would you correct or add to it?
0:04:09 I mean, there’s a way in which it was seemed first like a convincing answer, right?
0:04:15 And I think that there is something, a relationship between creativity
0:04:19 and randomness in the sense that it’s something that is non-deterministic.
0:04:24 It’s something that surprises you, surprises the person looking at the art.
0:04:26 It surprises the artist often.
0:04:31 And, you know, I think it makes a lot of sense, especially if you’re thinking,
0:04:35 you know, it’s no coincidence that a computer scientist came up with this definition.
0:04:40 Because if you’re thinking about creativity or what we call creativity
0:04:43 in large language models, for example, you can play around
0:04:47 if you’ve ever sort of played around with like the temperature gauges of an LLM.
0:04:52 You can basically turn up the temperature and turn up the amount of randomness
0:04:54 in the output that you get.
0:04:57 So, you know, if you ask ChatGBT, for example,
0:05:00 to give you a list of animals at a low temperature,
0:05:04 it’ll say something very basic like a dog, a cat, a horse or something.
0:05:07 And if you turn up the temperature, it’ll give you more unusual responses,
0:05:10 more statistically unlikely responses like an ant eater.
0:05:14 Or if you turn it way up, it’ll make up an animal like a whizzledy woo
0:05:17 or some sort of Susie and creature that doesn’t exist.
0:05:22 So, there is some element of randomness there.
0:05:25 I’m inclined to think that it’s not, I mean, obviously it’s not just randomness
0:05:30 because we also appreciate order, creativity and meaning.
0:05:35 And I think, you know, I’ve noticed this sort of folk theory,
0:05:40 I’ll call it that, of creativity that crops up in a lot of a lot of conversations
0:05:47 about human creativity, which I tend to call like the modular theory of creativity.
0:05:52 And it’s basically this idea that all works of art can be broken down
0:05:55 into these little modules or building blocks.
0:05:59 And that creativity is really just the ability to recombine, you know,
0:06:04 take two things that have never been put together before and combine them
0:06:06 in a new way and create something new.
0:06:11 And, you know, I think that’s like a great explanation of how a lot of gen AI works.
0:06:17 You know, you can ask a chatbot to write a poem about Elon Musk and the style of Dr. Seuss.
0:06:21 And yeah, those two things have never been put together before.
0:06:23 And it seems very creative.
0:06:28 My intuition, I guess, as a human is that our form of creativity
0:06:35 is a lot more complex than that, that it really has to do with filtering
0:06:39 everything you’ve ever experienced as a human artist, right?
0:06:42 All of your influences, which are unique to each person.
0:06:46 Everybody has sort of a unique data set that they’re working with.
0:06:49 And filtering that through your lived experience in the world.
0:06:54 For me, the things that I appreciate in art have a lot to do with vision,
0:06:57 with point of view, with the sense that you’re seeing something that’s been,
0:07:01 you know, filtered through an autobiography, through a life story.
0:07:07 And I think it’s really difficult to talk about how that’s happening,
0:07:10 you know, in AI models.
0:07:15 Yeah, I mean, we have these large language models,
0:07:20 things like chat GPT and mid-journey or pick your favorite poison.
0:07:26 And they produce language, but they do it without anything that I’d call
0:07:31 consciousness. And consciousness is something that’s notoriously hard
0:07:38 to define, but let’s just define it as the sensation of being an agent in the world.
0:07:42 LLMs don’t have that.
0:07:48 But is there any way in which you could call what they’re doing creative?
0:07:51 Or do we need some other word for it?
0:07:57 I think the difficult thing is that, you know, creativity is a concept that is,
0:08:01 I think, like all human concepts, like intrinsically anthropocentric,
0:08:07 that we created the term creativity to describe what we do as humans.
0:08:13 And we have this bad habit as humans of changing the definition of words
0:08:17 to sort of suit our opinion of ourselves, especially when, you know,
0:08:24 machine’s turn out to be able to do tasks that we previously thought were limited
0:08:29 to humans. I’m thinking about, you know, we saw this with chess, for example,
0:08:34 that was for a long time considered the height of human intelligence was being
0:08:42 able to play chess. And, you know, the moment that deep blue beat the human
0:08:46 champion of chess, the New York Times interviewed a bunch of philosophers
0:08:48 and computer scientists who were at that event.
0:08:52 And I think it was Douglas Hofstetter who said, oh, my God,
0:08:54 I thought that chess required thought.
0:08:55 Now I know that it doesn’t.
0:09:01 And it’s hard not to sense that something similar is happening with creativity,
0:09:03 that a lot of the elements that we didn’t understand about it.
0:09:07 I think it was easy to see it as somewhat mystical, you know,
0:09:11 we talk about inspiration, which has this sort of like almost metaphysical
0:09:14 or divine undertones to it.
0:09:19 And now that we see a lot of that work done by automated processes,
0:09:22 it becomes more difficult to say what creativity really is.
0:09:26 And I think there’s already an effort, and I sense it myself too,
0:09:32 this like effort to sort of cordon off this more special island of human
0:09:36 exceptionalism and say, no, what I’m doing is actually different.
0:09:41 And for me, consciousness and intent, it’s really hard to talk about those
0:09:43 things apart from creativity.
0:09:47 But I also doubt, you know, I think that there’s definitely like a little bit
0:09:51 of defensiveness on my part in defending those qualities because they are
0:09:53 something that machines don’t have.
0:09:56 Well, I think that’s what I like about you.
0:09:59 That we’re both on team human that way.
0:10:04 You know, I mean, even it’s such a slippery distinction, computation
0:10:06 and thought, what’s the difference?
0:10:09 You know, and you run into the same problem when you’re trying to think
0:10:13 about art and creativity and what is and isn’t art.
0:10:17 You made a comment about two modernist writers that you admire,
0:10:19 James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, right?
0:10:29 And what made them genuinely creative artists was that they created a form
0:10:31 of consciousness that felt new.
0:10:35 And they were able to do that because they were people experiencing a new
0:10:41 and different world and express what it was like to live in this new world.
0:10:49 And that’s not something a machine programmed to just recombine everything
0:10:53 humans have already written can do, right?
0:10:56 I mean, that seems to be a line here.
0:11:00 It’s something that current machines can’t do because they’re disembodied.
0:11:01 Yeah.
0:11:04 I’m very cautious against saying a machine will never do something,
0:11:07 especially given all the advances we’ve seen in recent years.
0:11:12 But certainly, I think the thing that I value and things like Woolf or Joyce
0:11:15 or, you know, someone like Borges, who’s doing really interesting
0:11:20 experimental work in the 1950s that felt totally sui generis,
0:11:25 is that it is something to do with capturing a way of being in the world
0:11:27 that hasn’t been experienced before, you know?
0:11:31 And I think it’s easy to see this in modernism and postmodernism
0:11:34 because history was changing so much during those periods.
0:11:36 And the human experience was changing, right?
0:11:41 And you had to have been a person embodied in a political and a cultural context
0:11:46 and, you know, living that reality in order to capture what that felt like.
0:11:48 So it’s an interesting thought experiment.
0:11:53 You know, if we move into sort of embodied cognition of some kind of AI,
0:11:56 I had a body and, you know, without walking around in the world,
0:12:01 had sort of sensory access completely to the world in the same way we do.
0:12:04 Would it be able to capture that also in ways that feel new?
0:12:05 Possibly.
0:12:09 But that’s not the models that we have right now.
0:12:15 You could ask ChatGPT to produce a hundred novels in the style of Hemingway or whatever.
0:12:17 And I guess it would do it.
0:12:21 But what creative value does that have?
0:12:26 Like, certainly the human prompting the AI isn’t an artist.
0:12:30 But, you know, is the thing ChatGPT spits out a piece of art?
0:12:32 Or is it something else?
0:12:38 I think it’s something else, but I also have a hard time explaining why.
0:12:46 I think that a lot of generative AI operates in this very kind of top-down approach to creativity,
0:12:50 which is that, you know, you have an idea, you have an inspiration of some kind.
0:12:55 You have a story you want to tell, and you put all of that into the model as a prompt,
0:12:59 and it does the grunt work, just basically enacts your will.
0:13:05 When I think about, like, the truly most creative moments in my experience writing,
0:13:08 it often happens the other way around from the bottom up.
0:13:12 Like, I often start writing something and I don’t know anything about what it’s going to be.
0:13:14 I don’t know the form.
0:13:15 I don’t know the style.
0:13:18 I don’t know, you know, what I’m going to argue if it’s an essay.
0:13:23 I just have, like, a sentence in my head or an image.
0:13:29 And I start with that, and all of those sort of larger features,
0:13:31 the things that you’re supposed to put into the prompt,
0:13:37 kind of grow out of that experience of making really small particular choices,
0:13:41 almost like those are emergent features of the creative process.
0:13:44 And I teach writing.
0:13:49 And the thing I often tell my students is you really have to fight,
0:13:53 especially during the early stages of a process to not know too much,
0:13:57 because you’re logical, like the left side of your brain or whatever,
0:14:03 is always going to be trying to get ahead of the process
0:14:09 or sort of impose something familiar or something known onto what you’re doing.
0:14:15 And it’s going to be less interesting than if you work in a more associative way,
0:14:18 because then your unconscious is entering into the picture.
0:14:27 So to me, like the idea of using generative AI to enact a concept,
0:14:33 it’s really almost a backwards way of thinking about how I think about art.
0:14:34 I think when humans interact with those models,
0:14:40 you’re dealing with something that’s basically competing with your own unconscious, right?
0:14:43 Which is where those unexpected connections come from.
0:14:53 [MUSIC]
0:14:57 Do you think a machine or an AI could ever really communicate
0:15:00 in the way we understand that phenomenon?
0:15:04 I don’t even think a machine can think for the reasons we’ve already explained,
0:15:07 but they certainly process information.
0:15:10 But are they capable of communication
0:15:14 in the way that humans are to each other?
0:15:18 The thing that I value about human communication,
0:15:20 and I’ll include in that art,
0:15:28 I read a lot of memoir and first person writing because I want access to another mind.
0:15:35 There’s things that you can say in an essay or a book
0:15:42 that you can’t say just in normal social conversations just because the form permits you to.
0:15:47 I love reading because I love seeing the way that other people see the world.
0:15:52 Obviously, there’s people who are able to do that in a way that’s very artistic,
0:15:58 that has beautiful syntax and images, and that’s part of communication, obviously.
0:16:01 But really the most important thing to me that we often take for granted
0:16:06 is this background knowledge that what I’m reading on the page has come from another mind
0:16:10 that had the desire to communicate something, right?
0:16:18 And so, when people ask, “Oh, do you think that an AI could create
0:16:22 the next best American novel, the great American novel,”
0:16:27 we’re talking a lot in those hypotheticals about technical skill.
0:16:34 And to me, I think even if it was on the sentence level or even on the level of concepts and ideas,
0:16:42 something that we would consider virtuoso, if it came a sort of an example of human genius,
0:16:46 just the fact that it came from a machine I think changes the way that we experience it.
0:16:50 I think that when I’m reading something online, for example,
0:16:56 and I start to suspect that it was generated by AI, it changes the way I’m reading,
0:16:59 there’s always that larger context of how we experience things,
0:17:02 and intent and consciousness is a big part of it.
0:17:05 You know, it’s a remarkable thing if you think about just how recently
0:17:11 we took it for granted that any text that you encounter was composed by a human being, right?
0:17:15 Even if it was a ghost writer or an administrative assistant or something,
0:17:20 even if it didn’t come from the person that it purported to come from,
0:17:22 there was a human consciousness behind it.
0:17:26 And that has been completely, you know, language has been detached from thought,
0:17:30 from human thought, just in the past few years.
0:17:36 And I can’t help but think that’s going to fundamentally change how we think about language
0:17:39 and how much we value language.
0:17:40 For better or worse?
0:17:42 For worse, absolutely.
0:17:43 Yeah.
0:17:48 This possibility that the ease with which we can produce language,
0:17:53 I mean, or we could talk about images too, but language is a little bit more immediate to me,
0:18:01 that that will actually devalue language the way that a currency becomes devalued through inflation,
0:18:06 that if we become so used to reading in terms of lowering our expectations,
0:18:08 there’s a lot of, I think, hypothetical questions about,
0:18:14 “Oh, can, you know, will AI ever produce something that’s recognized as great art?”
0:18:19 My response is always like, it doesn’t have to, to totally upend the industry.
0:18:23 It’s like, it’s good at producing things that are good enough.
0:18:23 Yeah.
0:18:29 And I notice this, especially like when I see visual art that’s been created by AI,
0:18:33 I’m much more impressed because it’s a field I don’t know as much about.
0:18:36 And then I’ll talk to friends of mine who are artists, you know, who will say like,
0:18:38 “Oh, that’s actually, you know, not that impressive to me.
0:18:41 It seems kind of generic or derivative.”
0:18:48 And, you know, I think about the type of work that, not even future, but just current,
0:18:50 AI models are able to produce.
0:18:55 They could very easily, I think, soon dominate the bestseller list, you know.
0:18:58 And to some people who are really devoted to the craft of writing, you know,
0:19:03 it might seem derivative or familiar, but that’s still not going to,
0:19:07 I mean, it could still change the industry in really profound ways.
0:19:13 There is something about the intentionality behind artistic creations
0:19:16 that really matters to us.
0:19:22 And, you know, it’s not like when I consume a piece of art, I’m asking myself,
0:19:24 you know, how long did it take to make this?
0:19:29 But I know subconsciously there was a lot of thought and energy put into it,
0:19:35 that there was a creator with experiences and feelings that I can relate to
0:19:38 who’s communicating something in a way.
0:19:43 They couldn’t if they weren’t a fellow human being sharing this common human experience.
0:19:44 And that matters, you know?
0:19:52 It’s a feature, not a bug, as our beloved tech bros like to say.
0:19:58 I think that effort that we have to put into making things is part of what gives it meaning,
0:20:00 both for the person who’s producing it, right?
0:20:03 Like the actual sacrifices and the difficulty of making something
0:20:08 is what makes it feel really satisfying when you finally get it right.
0:20:10 And it’s also, yeah, for the person experiencing it, right?
0:20:16 I think about this a lot, even with things that we might not consider, you know, works of genius.
0:20:21 But things like ways in which everyday people were creative for many years, you know,
0:20:27 like I think about my grandfather used to write occasional poetry.
0:20:32 So he would make up very simple, kind of funny poems for different occasions,
0:20:35 for birthdays or anniversaries that he wrote himself.
0:20:38 And he didn’t have a college education, but he was creative.
0:20:41 And the poems are very creative.
0:20:43 In many ways, they had simple rhyme schemes.
0:20:47 They were personalized for the person or for the occasion.
0:20:52 And, you know, that was a way for him to express his creativity.
0:20:57 And that’s precisely the kind of thing that an LLM could do very well, right?
0:21:02 Write a simple poem, you know, put it in the prompt to sort of you want it to be about,
0:21:04 come up with a rhyme scheme.
0:21:11 And I think about, like, what is the effect of somebody today listening to something like that,
0:21:16 you know, sort of personalized poem and not knowing if it was actually created by the person
0:21:20 or if it was just produced through a prompt.
0:21:24 I think that really does change how you experience something like that.
0:21:30 Do you think that maybe AI will make just radically new kinds of art possible?
0:21:34 Maybe we can’t imagine what that will be.
0:21:40 But maybe it’ll be awesome and I’ll look dumb in retrospect for saying it would be terrible.
0:21:49 Yeah, I mean, any of us who are daring to speak about this topic right now really are putting ourselves out there
0:21:53 for risking looking stupid in two years or five years down the road.
0:21:59 But I will say it is true that AI is often called an alien form of intelligence
0:22:03 and the fact that it reasons very differently than we do.
0:22:09 It doesn’t intuitively understand what’s relevant in a data set the way that we do
0:22:13 because we’ve evolved together to sort of value the same things.
0:22:19 So, you know, you see this in something like the famous case of AlphaGo
0:22:25 where this algorithm one beat the human champion of Go, Chinese board game,
0:22:29 by making a move that basically no human would ever make.
0:22:32 That’s how it was described by a lot of former Go champions,
0:22:36 that it was a completely unhuman move.
0:22:42 And I try to think about what that would look like in art, you know,
0:22:47 because if you think about like if art and creativity is always this sort of tension between
0:22:52 novelty and something that is new or innovated
0:22:57 versus the lineage of a tradition in the form that you’re working in.
0:23:03 Like, is there a space in which something could be sort of an alien move
0:23:07 but still strike us as meaningful, I guess, is the question?
0:23:12 I don’t know. Yeah, I would grant that it’s entirely possible that
0:23:19 in the future AI will create art that’s maybe more beautiful and profound
0:23:22 than anything we could create or even imagine.
0:23:30 But being the product of an alien intelligence,
0:23:33 what could it possibly mean to us?
0:23:37 You know, I always think about that line from
0:23:43 Victor Stein, the philosopher, he said, if a lion could speak,
0:23:47 we wouldn’t be able to understand what it says.
0:23:51 And we wouldn’t be able to understand because we don’t inhabit the world of lions.
0:23:53 We don’t know what it’s like to be a lion.
0:23:56 We don’t share a way of life with lions.
0:23:59 So how could we possibly understand what they’re saying?
0:24:03 And I think there’s, I think that’s true of this too.
0:24:11 I really don’t think we fully appreciate how different a truly
0:24:14 inorganic intelligence must be from us.
0:24:17 You mentioned the word embodied earlier.
0:24:23 I mean, our embodiedness is so essential to what and who we are,
0:24:27 that shared experience, that shared vulnerability.
0:24:32 It’s the whole basis of mutual understanding and even ethics, really.
0:24:38 And meaning is this thing we create together as humans sharing a common way of life.
0:24:42 And I have to believe that we’re going to lose so much of that
0:24:49 in a world where we’re mostly consuming products created by machines.
0:24:55 Maybe that as much as anything is what scares the shit out of me.
0:24:59 Yeah. I mean, I’ve felt it myself.
0:25:03 I feel lately, and maybe this is just being a writer too,
0:25:06 but that I live a lot in my head and I live a lot in, you know,
0:25:08 I think being a writer is in some sense,
0:25:11 you’re always living in this virtual world of language
0:25:15 that is sort of adjacent to the real world.
0:25:18 But I think when you’re also spending 10 hours a day
0:25:22 in front of a computer screen and interacting, you know,
0:25:25 in your everyday life and work and everything with other people virtually,
0:25:29 you definitely become detached in a very strange way
0:25:31 and a very subtle way from your body.
0:25:35 And, you know, I think about the role of the body.
0:25:38 The body is so closely connected to what we call the unconscious.
0:25:41 And I don’t mean that in any sort of like, you know,
0:25:45 Jungian psychoanalytic sense, just like the unconscious intelligence,
0:25:49 all the things that our body does that we don’t pay attention to in any given day.
0:25:56 And there’s a reason why I think writers often say, oh, I got my best idea when I was out in a walk,
0:25:59 right, that there’s something that happens when you’re actually interacting
0:26:02 in the world that makes connections in your mind.
0:26:04 And I don’t know how that happens,
0:26:08 but it’s something that I think is important.
0:26:09 It’s important to creativity.
0:26:12 Well, there’s also something that happens when you go out in the world
0:26:15 and interact with other human beings.
0:26:15 Yes.
0:26:20 We have all these fantastical sci-fi dystopian scenarios,
0:26:27 but I tend to think our actual dystopian future will be much sadder and much more boring.
0:26:32 You know, it’s not terminators fighting humans in the street.
0:26:37 It’s a world rendered flat and sterile by technology
0:26:41 where humans have offloaded all the thinking and awkwardness and imperfections
0:26:49 and sincerity that have made the human experience so messy and awesome.
0:26:53 Do you remember that controversy over the Google Gemini commercial
0:26:58 and Gemini is Google’s competitor with OpenAI’s chat GPT?
0:27:00 So just so the audience knows what I’m talking about,
0:27:06 the commercial is it’s a young girl who wants to write a fan letter.
0:27:08 I’ve always thought she was following in my footsteps.
0:27:10 Hey, go get her, baby.
0:27:12 But lately she’s been looking up to someone else.
0:27:18 To her hero who’s an Olympic gold medalist sprinter or something like that.
0:27:22 And then her dad says,
0:27:25 She wants to show Sydney some love and I’m pretty good with words,
0:27:28 but this has to be just right.
0:27:32 So Gemini, help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is.
0:27:37 And so he’s just going to let the AI write it for them.
0:27:39 And it’s horrifying.
0:27:41 People were like, it did not go the way Google thought it would,
0:27:48 but it’s horrifying to me because it shows that AI isn’t just coming for our art and
0:27:49 entertainment.
0:27:52 It’s not just going to be, I don’t know, writing sitcoms or I don’t know,
0:27:53 maybe doing podcasts.
0:27:59 It’s going to supplant sincere, authentic human to human communication.
0:28:02 It’s going to automate our emotional lives.
0:28:07 And I don’t know what to call that potential world other than a machine world populated
0:28:12 by machine like people and maybe eventually just machine people.
0:28:17 And that’s a world I desperately, desperately want to avoid.
0:28:18 Yeah.
0:28:20 Gosh, it was.
0:28:21 Sorry, that was a bit of a rant.
0:28:21 No, no, no, no.
0:28:24 I have been thinking about that and it’s funny.
0:28:27 I haven’t actually seen that, but I’ve read about it in which.
0:28:29 Oh God, it’s so bad.
0:28:31 So there’s, it reminded me of a couple things.
0:28:36 The first is, you know, my, my husband teaches freshman English in college.
0:28:44 And he once sort of saw one of his students or no, one of his students told him about
0:28:49 this story about how she was looking over her shoulder and seeing in class one of her friends
0:28:54 who was chatting with somebody pretend sort of a potential romantic partner, I guess,
0:29:03 and was taking his texts and copying it and putting it into chat GPT and saying respond to
0:29:08 this and then copying the output and putting it back into the text message.
0:29:14 And the student who oversaw this was, was like this, you know, person on the other end of the
0:29:18 line is basically chatting with a chat bot, but they don’t know what they think they’re
0:29:19 talking to a human being.
0:29:25 And yeah, I think about all those ways in which you think, you know, I think that the thing that’s
0:29:30 really insidious is like, we don’t know if we’re talking to a human or not oftentimes.
0:29:36 And one of the, I was, you know, for a long time wrote a advice column for Wired Magazine where
0:29:39 people could write in questions about technology in their everyday life.
0:29:45 And one of the questions I got very shortly after chat GPT was released was somebody who
0:29:48 was going to be the best man in their friend’s wedding.
0:29:54 And he said, can I use chat GPT ethically, you know, to do a best man speech for me.
0:29:59 And, you know, which I like, there’s cases of people doing this, the people who use it to
0:30:00 write their wedding vows.
0:30:09 And my response in my first instinct was like, well, you’re robbing yourself of the ability to
0:30:15 actually try to put into words what you are feeling for your friend and what that relationship
0:30:21 means to you. And it’s not as though those feelings just exist in you already.
0:30:24 You know, I think anyone who’s, who’s written something very personal like this,
0:30:28 you realize that you actually like start to feel the emotions as you’re putting it into
0:30:31 language and trying to articulate it.
0:30:36 And, you know, I think about the same thing with this hypothetical like fan letter that the girl
0:30:37 is writing in the commercial, right?
0:30:41 It’s like you’re stealing from your child the opportunity to actually try to
0:30:44 access her emotions through language.
0:30:47 To be a human being.
0:30:47 Yes, yeah.
0:30:54 I mean, I think one of the most profound things digital tech has done to the human mind is
0:31:01 it has conditioned us to expect instant gratification and to not tolerate boredom or
0:31:02 patience.
0:31:07 And so, you know, you’ll hear some artists making the case that, you know, AI will be this great
0:31:11 collaborative creative tool for humans.
0:31:20 But I think it’ll just encourage us to think less, do less, feel less and rely on technology
0:31:23 to do living for us.
0:31:26 And again, I can imagine that world, but I don’t want to live in it, you know, and,
0:31:34 but maybe it’s kind of a troubling thought, but maybe humanity is more pliable than we think.
0:31:40 I definitely think that humans are more flexible than we think and that there it is certain that
0:31:45 where we will evolve alongside this technology and find new forms of expression.
0:31:48 That doesn’t mean that it’s always for the good.
0:31:51 There’s tendency to go back and say like, oh, people said the same thing about photography.
0:31:54 You know, when that came out that that wasn’t real art.
0:31:57 People said the same thing about television, you know, if you go back and read like in the,
0:32:02 you know, 80s and 90s, just all of these sort of writers who are just ranting against how
0:32:07 television is the end of humanity and what’s making us passive.
0:32:10 And nobody likes to be reactionary, obviously.
0:32:16 But it’s also true that like there was truth to those objections, right?
0:32:20 Like as television made my life better overall, I don’t know that it has.
0:32:26 And so I think that the thing that I worry about is that in the effort to not seem like
0:32:32 a Luddite or whatever, we’re actually slowly sort of anesthetizing ourselves towards these
0:32:39 changes that are happening to the human experience and that are happening very quickly in this case.
0:32:54 This is a big question, but I’m comfortable asking you because of your
0:33:04 theological background. Do you think we have any real sense of the spiritual impact of AI?
0:33:11 Are you talking about spiritual in terms of like actual, like the way people practice spiritual
0:33:14 traditions and religion or just sort of like the human,
0:33:23 all of it? It’s a paradox in some way, right? Because I think technologies are rooted in very
0:33:28 anti-spiritual in the sense that it’s usually very reductive and materialist
0:33:32 understanding of human nature. But with every new technological development,
0:33:39 I think there’s also been this tendency to sort of spiritualize it or think of it in superstitious
0:33:44 ways. I think about like the emergence of photography during the Civil War and how people
0:33:51 believed that you could see dead people in the background or the idea that radio could sort of
0:33:58 transmit voices from the spiritual world. So I think that it’s not as though technology is
0:34:05 going to rob us of a spiritual life. I do think that technological progress competes in some ways
0:34:10 as a form of transcendence with the type of transcendence that spiritual and religious
0:34:19 traditions talk about in the sense that it is a way to push beyond our current existence
0:34:24 and to sort of get in touch with something that’s bigger than the human, which I think is a very
0:34:30 deep human instinct is to try to get in touch with something that’s bigger than us. And I think
0:34:36 that there’s a trace of that in the effort to build AI, this idea that we’re going to create
0:34:42 something that is going to be able to see the world from a higher perspective and that’s going
0:34:50 to be able to sort of give our lives meaning in a new way. And I think that if you look at most
0:34:58 spiritual traditions and wisdom literature from around the world, it’s usually involves this
0:35:01 paradox where like if you want to transcend yourself, you also have to acknowledge your
0:35:06 limitations. You have to acknowledge that the ego is illusion. You have to admit that you’re
0:35:13 center. You have to sort of humble yourself in order to access that higher reality. And I think
0:35:20 technology is a sort of transcendence without the work and the suffering that that entails
0:35:27 for us in a more spiritual sense. Yeah, I think that’s right. And what I’m always
0:35:34 thinking about in these sorts of conversations is this long term question of what we are as human
0:35:41 beings, what we’re doing to ourselves and what we’re evolving into. I mean, Nietzsche love this
0:35:48 distinction between being versus becoming. Humanity is not some fixed thing. We’re not a static
0:35:54 being like everything in nature. We’re in this process of becoming. So what are we becoming?
0:36:01 I think as it stands, we’re becoming more like our machines. And I think that’s bad.
0:36:08 Yeah, there’s at some point, I think a threshold that’s crossed, right, where I mean, and where is
0:36:13 that if we’re for becoming something, we’ve already been becoming something different,
0:36:19 I think with the technologies that we’re using right now. And is there some hard line where we’ll
0:36:26 become like post human or another species? I don’t know. My instinct is to think that
0:36:34 there’s going to be more pushback against that future. As we approach it, then it might seem
0:36:39 right now in the abstract. I think that it’s difficult to articulate exactly what we value
0:36:46 about the human experience until we are confronted with technologies that are threatening it in some
0:36:51 way. And I think that a lot of the some of the really great writing and the conversations that
0:36:58 are happening right now are about, let’s try to actually put into words what we value about being
0:37:03 human. And I think there’s a way in which that these technologies might actually help clarify
0:37:08 that conversation in a way that we haven’t been forced to articulate it before. And to think
0:37:14 about like, what are our values? And how can we create technology that is actually going to serve
0:37:19 those values as opposed to making us the subjects of what these machines happen to be good at doing?
0:37:27 Well, this was a pleasure. Yeah, it was great. Megan Ogiblin, thanks so much for doing this.
0:37:34 And if you are listening and you have not read Megan’s book, God, Human, Animal, Machine,
0:37:40 Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning, don’t be ridiculous. Go buy it and read it.
0:37:47 It’s great. Megan, thanks. You’re the best. Thanks so much, Sean.
0:38:00 All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I definitely did. Megan really is one of my
0:38:06 favorite writers and thinkers. And honestly, these are just the questions that get me out of bed in
0:38:12 the morning. This is the kind of stuff I live to talk about. And if you’re listening to the show,
0:38:19 I guess you do too, or I hope you do. Anyway, I really want to know what you think of the episode.
0:38:23 Did you like it? Could I have done something better? I don’t know. Just if you have a thought,
0:38:30 send it to me. You can drop us a line at TheGrayArea@Vox.com. And once you’re finished with that,
0:38:38 go ahead and rate and review and subscribe to the podcast. This episode was produced by Beth
0:38:45 Morrissey. Today’s episode was engineered by Erika Huang, fact-checked by Anouk Dusso, edited by Jorge
0:38:52 Just, and Alex O’Brington wrote our theme music. New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
0:38:59 Listen and subscribe. This show is part of Vox. Support Vox’s journalism by joining our membership
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