AI and Empty Art
Humans create art because at some level we need to and always have. We spend all of our lives trapped in the solitary confinement that is our skulls, a solipsistic nightmare if you let it become one. But art, experiencing art to a smaller degree, but really creating art (which requires experiencing the art of others—it’s all a conversation and always has been), it’s a chance to shake loose those shackles and feel some sunlight on your soul, the only way to let your mind touch someone else’s mind, even for a brief moment, like two cracked eggs whose membranes briefly become one on my nonstick pan before I break them apart with my spatula to maximize the crispy surface area. Art is air your mind breathes.
I include games within the category of art, perhaps obviously by dent of that’s where I spend all my art-making free-time. But I would go further and suggest that playing games, particularly roleplaying games and particularly face to face, is one of the most gratifying forms of art because the conversation, the meeting of minds, happens so rapidly and repeatedly, the friction of your ideas and mine cannot help but light some spark, the same spark our ancestors no doubt could feel deep in their bones as they shared stories around a fire at night.
As so much of our reality retreats from the realm of packed flesh and air stagnant with sweat, I become increasingly nostalgic for days when being cooped up with other people was my norm and being alone was a nice retreat. Now it is quite the reverse, where I never have to leave my solitude if I don’t want to. I can have food show up at my doorstep and chat with friends over myriad messaging platforms owned by corporations that surely have my best interests at heart and who don’t see a dime when I simply meet up with a friend for drinks or have them over to play a board game. As cringe as it is to cite a Dead Male Author, I am afraid that I am reminded more and more of a thought frequently circled by one of the cringest, deadest and malest of authors, which thought is nicely contained in an interview snippet:
“[A]s the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up, like—I mean, you and I coulda done this through e-mail, and I never woulda had to meet you, and that woulda been easier for me. Right? Like, at a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? but if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.”
We all have that machinery already, but it’s getting rusty. Much has been made of the human desire for stories, but for stories to really land, there is a storyteller and an audience. You tell me a story with a vision in your head and your words conjure images in my mind that perchance resemble yours. That’s some type of magic, right? A greater breakthrough of ingenuity than even the most advanced weight loss drug developed from lizard spit currently on the market. When I describe the dragon’s scaly body dimly reflected across the inky water of the subterranean lake below it as it flies toward you, and in your mind’s eye you see it just as your elf would, we are performing some ancient magic indeed.
There will come a day when artificial intelligence will be capable of telling you about that dragon that is hallucinatory in the intended way and not in the unintended ways we currently expect from the robominds. Where the 5e play culture’s GM shortage will be “solved” by AI voice bots that listens to a group of friends and regurgitates whatever it can after it has devoured ten thousand years of human storytelling traditions, effortlessly managing the complex rules of 7th edition dungeons and dragons so that you don’t have to think too hard as you spill beer all over your bowl of pretzels. It may even eventually be “good” at doing so, perhaps capable of passing some dungeon master equivalent of a Turing Test. But what it will not be is art.
AI cannot produce art not because it can’t write or draw or compose or run an elf game; it either can do these things or it surely will one day learn to do them. It cannot produce art because its simulacrum of human creativity is empty, masturbatory nothingness. Whether or not we know it consciously, the joy of art comes in large part from engaging with another human being, whether face to face or across the chasms of time allowed by stable media. Games allow even more unique interactions with humans because the game designer isn’t (usually) at your table, but they are a participant (but just one of many) in the game that will result. When you read a book or hear a song or play a game, it’s a reprieve from the windowless cell of the solitary mind, albeit brief. The artist is breaking you out. AI art can provide only the solace of a photo, perhaps realistic, of the outside world to pin on the wall of your cell. You’re still alone. You’re still alone. You’re still alone. But you don’t have to be.
