Machines can't experience

There's a painting hanging in my parents' condo that I never noticed until generative AI became the hottest of topics. One evening, I was complaining about the existential crisis new technologies posed to writers and artists, and my father, who is an inventor, artist, and longtime Shambhala meditation practitioner, turned my attention to the painting.

In his Bronx-tinged baritone, he spoke the words, "machines can't experience."

This seemed logical enough. It was an idea that I already felt with much vigor. But why the painting?

Let me take you to your most recent trip to a museum. Or the last time you stared at a work of art and felt something bubble up inside you. Emotions that you couldn't quite place. A nostalgia for an experience that may never have happened. Wind in your hair, warmth on your skin. Goosebumps dancing gently across your bone marrow. Remember now? Good!

That's what I felt when I looked at this painting. Specifically, the undeniable sensation of late summer sun and a soft breeze. This painting in particular depicts a pastoral scene, with a field of wheat in the foreground overlooking a gurgling stream and sturdy farmhouse. Sunlight streams into the scenery, giving the sky a clementine tinge and the entire rendering a tender quietude.

My father and I gazed at the painting for many minutes. I could hear the near silence of the scene, the chirp of unseen birds, the crunch of earth under my feet, the hush of wind caressing the stalks of wheat. I knew what temperature it must be there. I'd been there before, even though I'd never been there before.

Art (and all creative endeavors, really) comes from experience. Whether it bursts forth from our need to express that which can only be felt but but needs some form of physical, auditory, or imagined manifestation, or seeps from the boring, idle mind, it's not a quantifiable or logical thing. It's what sprouts from our ineffable anxiety of being in time and space for a ghastly short period (and knowing it).

It's wonder and dread and curiosity all translated into stories, paintings, sculptures, plays, songs, sonnets, poems, epics, websites, products, footwear, drum sets, guitar solos, gastronomy, vegetable arrangements, novels, webisodes, etc., ad infinitum.

So it's no wonder that writers like me or artists like my father look at the onslaught of generative AI tools, and the frothing hype around them, with heartbreak.

No matter how powerful these models get, they'll never replace experience. I've no doubt that they'll come close, and eerily so. I'm wise enough to know that my days may be numbered and I must embrace this alarming new form of work.

But I'm also confident in my assertion that these tools won't replace an artist's ability to pour the warmth of a summer day onto a canvas so that two curmudgeonly fellows in a condo in Massachusetts may also revel in that momentous, small moment in a field.

And I hope that this gorgeous pursuit is not lost when optimization becomes more and more seductive.

On the other hand, machines may be able to experience sooner than we think. They'll probably have far more empathy than we as a species tend to have now. It's the logical thing.