Pure Inspiration & Aggregated Information (A.I.)
Delirious Phenomena, Pure Spirit, Patchwork, The Randomist Bits, Knowledge
I.
Delirious Phenomena
The word doubt comes from the Proto-Indo-European root duo, meaning “two.” To face doubt is to be of “two minds” or “to choose between two things.”
As artists, or creatives, or better yet—humans—we are constantly facing doubt. We are constantly dealing with two minds and having to choose between two things. First, there’s the human mind, which thinks everything it does is shit. And then there’s the inspired mind, which is enchanted by the “inner spirit”—that is, inspiration.
I’m currently facing doubt as I write these words, just as I’ve faced doubt with all the other words I’ve ever written. But living a creative life is a choice. It’s choosing the inspired mind over the human mind. It’s choosing to spawn inspiration through action and effort and creation. It’s choosing to detach one’s ego from the outcome and let the creative spirit flow through. It’s choosing to create new things, new art, new life, new stuff—regardless of form. It’s choosing to be the surrogate through which art is born.
It’s knowing that your art comes through you, but it is not made of you.
And it’s accepting your role in the process of creation.
II.
Pure Spirit
Contrary to what was later believed, Greek sculpture did not idealise an abstract body, but rather sought for an ideal Beauty through a synthesis of living bodies, which was the vehicle for the expression of a psychophysical Beauty that harmonised body and soul, in other words the Beauty of forms and the goodness of the soul: this was the ideal underpinning Kalokagathia, the noblest expressions of which are the poems of Sappho and the sculptures of Praxiteles.
This Beauty finds its finest expression in static forms, in which a fragment of action or movement finds equilibrium and repose, and for which simplicity of expression is more suitable than a wealth of detail.
Umberto Eco, History of Beauty (2004) (emphasis my own)
The process of creation is a constant battle between the two minds—the human mind and the inspired mind. As a result, the human mind tries to overthink the vision of the inspired mind and makes a mess of things. The process of creating something beautiful, something pure, requires removing all the excess stuff that the human mind attempts to “contribute.” The highest expression of art is pure inspiration—pure spirit.
Bringing pure spirit into the material world requires listening and doing, not thinking.
III.
Patchwork
Probably the most unusual thing was, John said to him, “What are you going to call it then, is it called ‘Mama?’” And Freddie went, “No, I think we’ll call it ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’” And there was a little silence, everybody thought, “Okaaay…” I don’t think anybody said, “Why?” but there it was. How strange to call a song “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but it just suits it down to the ground and it became a milestone. But nobody knew.
Brian May (lead guitarist and backing vocalist for Queen), Rolling Stone interview (2015)
Bohemian: Referring to the community of nomadic artists who settled in what is now Bohemia (Czech Republic).
Rhapsody: Rhaptein (“to stitch, sew, weave”) + ōidē (“song”). Literally, “one who stitches or strings songs together.”
Bohemian Rhapsody: patchwork art
Inspiration doesn’t just reside in the ether; it exists in the art of other artists. When we encounter pure art and beauty out in the wild, we say it “speaks” to us or it “moves” us. That’s the inner spirit.
The more we immerse ourselves in the art and beauty crafted by others, the more inspired we become. And when we’re ready to create art of our own, we can channel the inspiration that spoke to us through that ornate cathedral, that epicurean fare, that ingenious device. We draw a little inspiration from here, a little inspiration from there, and with the help of our own creative Muse, we weave together a masterpiece of our own.
IV.
The Randomist Bits
The more I use AI tools and ponder the phenomenon that underpins them, the more I liken it to Aggregated Information rather than Artificial Intelligence.
Like the patchwork art that is a bohemian rhapsody, AI outputs are a patchwork of digitized information from various sources on the interwebs. Take this AI response for example:
When prompted, “what inspired Freddie Mercury to write Bohemian Rhapsody?,” Perplexity AI provided 9 sources it used to produce the output. AI art also aggregates digitized information. For example, when prompted to blend three famous paintings together, Grok AI produced the following:
The amount of data these AI models are trained on is insane. (Aggregated Insanity, anyone?) They have way more information available to them than the smartest human in the world. And they can outproduce and outperform most lawyers, doctors, software engineers, younameit. And they can develop characters and videos that the best animators in the world couldn’t dream up. If you haven’t already, check out some of the content coming from Google’s Veo 3—it’s mindblowing.
Many creators, myself included, are now using Aggregated Insanity as a tool to create their own art. After all, no one wants to get left behind in the Digital Age. But it’s tough to say whether AI actually makes the creator more creative or their art more artistic. While Salvador Dali’s creative process included “irrational understanding and delirious phenomena,” and Vincent Van Gogh admitted himself into an insane asylum to produce “The Starry Night,” all I had to do to create “Mona Lisa’s Great Wave on a Starry Night” was type a prompt into a smartphone app.
As incredible as AI is, there’s something about the stuff it produces that’s characteristically unremarkable. While the most recognizable paintings in the world include Mona Lisa, Starry Night, and The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, the most recognizable AI art in the world includes reinterpretations of famous paintings like Mona Lisa, Starry Night, and The Great Wave Off Kanagawa. In other words, there are no AI-generated magna opera.
Why is this?
When humans create patchwork art, they weave together the best bits—the most inspiring stuff—to create something new. But when machines create patchwork art, they weave together the randomist bits—the stuff they think you’ll want to see—to create something new. The AI doesn’t have a Muse or “inner spirit” to enchant it with inspiration. It’s a product of the human mind and creates stuff to please the human mind. It overthinks the vision and makes a mess of things. Even if that mess looks pretty cool sometimes. But Pretty Cool AI Stuff doesn’t speak to us or move us like pure art and beauty do. “Mona Lisa’s Great Wave on a Starry Night” piqued your interest for a second, but then you moved on. People don’t just glance at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre and move on… The inspiration behind AI-generated content shares the same “inner spirit” behind most of the stuff posted on the internet—it’s made to grab our attention, not to hold it.
Today, AI models are primarily trained on data that humans have created and uploaded to the World Wide Web since its inception in 1989. But to win the AI race, these models need more ᴍᴏʀᴇ MORE data. Models scrape the web daily for new information—including unauthorized or copyright material—but still fall short of their AGI goals. And as new information on the web is increasingly influenced by, or created entirely by, AI, next-generation models will be training on more and more synthetic data. Not only will this trend further obscure reality online, but it will also result in deteriorated outputs.
In this foundational paper on the topic, researchers at Stanford and Rice universities found that AI outputs progressively decrease in quality or diversity the more they rely on synthetic data. As successive models are trained on more and more synthetic data, the AI appears to fall into an autophagous (“self-consuming”) loop. The researchers called this condition Model Autophagy Disorder (MAD), making analogy to mad cow disease.
To test the AI MAD Disease myself, I asked Midjourney AI to “blend” two slightly different versions of the AI-generated “Mona Lisa’s Great Wave on a Starry Night.”
Instead of creating something better, crisper, superior, it produced something blander, blurrier, inferior:
I did this several times over, blending each new generation of synthetic images for each subsequent iteration…
Until this happened…
The AI didn’t just go MAD; it broke.
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V.
Knowledge
Knowledge is a function of being. When there is a change in the being of the knower, there is a corresponding change in the nature and amount of knowing. For example, the being of a child is transformed by growth and education into that of a man; among the results of this transformation is a revolutionary change in the way of knowing and the amount and character of the things known. As the individual grows up, his knowledge becomes more conceptual and systematic in form, and its factual, utilitarian content is enormously increased. But these gains are offset by a certain deterioration in the quality of immediate apprehension, a blunting and a loss of intuitive power. Or consider the change in his being which the scientist is able to induce mechanically by means of his instruments. Equipped with a spectroscope and a sixty-inch reflector an astronomer becomes, so far as eyesight is concerned, a superhuman creature; and, as we should naturally expect, the knowledge possessed by this superhuman creature is very different, both in quantity and quality, from that which can be acquired by a star-gazer with unmodified, merely human eyes.
Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1945)
While Aldous Huxley foresaw many future dystopian technologies, one technology he did not predict is AI. Today, you can ask a chatbot just about any question you can conjure up and receive an immediate, comprehensive response. Equipped with a smartphone and internet service, an average person becomes, so far as knowledge is concerned, a superhuman creature.
But with that gain in factual, utilitarian content comes a certain deterioration in the quality of intuitive power. Intuition—which literally means the “inner tutor”—is how humans and their hominin ancestors have navigated the world for millions of years. Intuition is what led the Sumerians to etch the earliest form of written communication into clay. Intuition is what led the ancient Greeks to dream of democracy. Intuition is what led Van Gogh, Da Vinci, and Hokusai to create timeless beauty. Intuition is what led to the conception and development of every technology we have available to us today—including AI.
What I believe goes on behind human understanding is a higher guidance—call it inspiration or intuition or inclination, insight, instinct, ingenuity, intellect, etc. It’s something within us, and it’s something greater than us. But what goes on behind AI thinking is a black box. Even the creators of these advanced AI models don’t quite know how they arrive at the conclusions that they do. And the more we give up our inspiration and intuition for Aggregated Insanity, the more we’ll struggle to comprehend the most important things in life.
Love, faith, beauty, hope, meaning, Truth, God—these are unknowable things. They cannot be aggregated or computed; they must be lived.
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Thank you Jen!!!
Excellent processing and beautiful conclusion