AI and What We Value

"Human made" is the new "organically grown"

“AI will be better than humans in creative, artistic, and competitive domains, and it's going to replace us."

I believe this is the wrong framing, because it’s predicated on a misunderstanding of what art and competition are intended for: human consumption.

Artists should not fear AI. They should view it as a tool that can enhance them, not an entity that supplants them. Because humans are the arbiters of value, not machines. “Value” is not a mechanical, objective concept; it is contextual, capricious, interpretive, and human.

We don't always value what's objectively best or technically superior. We innately seek out unique individual expression, and associate it with its creator. When there is no human to accompany that creation, it rings a bit hollow.

We have many an "irrational" need and attraction to a human presence when experiencing an authentic human message. What we consider as "real" and "fake" is entirely psychological framing that cannot be rationalized away.

Examples:

• If someone's lip-syncing at a concert... do you like that? Or do you feel a little betrayed? By all audio accounts, it’s better than the artist's live voice. In fact singers often sound much worse live than they do in the studio. Lip-syncing gives you that pristine studio sound in the arena. Weird we don't prefer it.

• Do people favor the Harry Potter originals or Harry Potter fan fiction? I'm sure some of it's better than JK Rowling's work. I bet Claude could easily whip up some stories that rival it. Why is hers famous and revered, and not the derivatives? What connotation does the word “original” have that has such valence to us…? Why do we consider the initial version that came from the human progenitor the authentic one?

• Luxury items: can you tell the difference between a fake (what makes it fake?) Louis Vuitton bag and a “real” one? What about an organic diamond borne from millions of years of pressure, or a lab-made one? The lab-made diamonds have less “imperfections” and are way cheaper. They look exactly the same, and are even made with similar carbon-crystallization processes. What’s not to like?

Someone wrote this in response to one of my essays:

This illustrates my point beautifully, he’d be “devastated” if he found out a machine was behind my accounts, and not a person’s creative expression and thoughts (this is not the first time I’ve heard this). Why? The writing and content is unchanged, but the mental framing and appreciation is dramatically decremented when there is no human behind it. You can find the essay he’s referring to here: The Tim Walz Archetype & Democracy Dies in the Drive Thru

I would never have an AI write my stuff. The more presence an LLM has in your work, the less presence you have, and there is zero point to any of my writing if it's not a representation and extension of me.

It’d be a betrayal, both to my readers and to myself, because it’d be a lie. Textual lip-syncing but worse, because it’s not even your own lyrics you’re faking, so it’s not your own ideas or thoughts, yet you’re presenting them otherwise.

For technical writing or the like, fine, go nuts, it’s not something anyone enjoys reading anyways (clearly you don’t enjoy creating it either, otherwise you wouldn’t outsource its production). No one consumes research papers or technical manuals for the author’s artistic expression. But for whatever it is I’m doing on my blog and on Twitter: it makes you a fraud if you conceal it and present it as you.

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Art is Not an Objective Domain, Because It’s a Human One

Look at this. This is perhaps the most famous piece of American modern art ever. Do you think Midjourney can "do better"? Because I sure do. We don't care though. Because that's not how appreciation or sentimentality works. You want a human expressing something to you, that resonates in a human way. This is an evolved characteristic.

Part of the value we ascribe to creative work (and not only creative work) comes from the effort we perceive was put into it. We value homemade things more than factory output. You value a person's hand stitching more than the sewing machine.

You judge and appreciate how something is made and the effort put into it sometimes nearly as much as you do the thing itself. This is known as the Labor Illusion of Value, however calling it an “illusion” doesn’t make it go away. Again, this is an evolved belief we’ve cultivated over centuries, and not something we can rationalize away.

You know how people like their fruit labeled "organic" because something being natural is instinctively more attractive? "Human made" is the new organic in the artificial-abundance era of AI. Even when The Machine is vastly superior to us, it does not change the human condition of how creative value is perceived and appreciated. It's your programming to seek it out and exalt… the human.

You’ll still want anthropogenic work from brilliant folks you admire, and you won't cherish a machine’s output the same way you do your fellow man’s. A machine does not feel or understand the world or humanity in the manner we do, and its characterization and depiction of it will be lacking the psychological touch that the lab-made diamond is all too familiar with.

Art is a microcosm of humanity: expressed via text, imagery, or sound, and consumed with the heart.

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Human vs Machine Competition

Another example of human imperfection prevailing over AI superiority: competition. Say, chess.

AI dominates us at chess, computers have basically solved the game. Yet it's Magnus Carlsen and slow, plodding, blemished meat contests we watch. Two computers playing each other just doesn't fill the seats the same way, because clinical robot performance isn't what you watch when elite-yet-flawed fellas are available. He's just like me!

It's your programming to venerate human triumphs, accomplishments, and performance. We are the consumers of art and competitive feats, not machines. Thus humans are the judges of what's valuable in these domains, and we value... the human.

Artwork addendum:

Regarding the art you see in here and elsewhere in my essays and online: I create it all myself with Midjourney. I do not have the motor skills and technical skills to create them without AI, but by collaborating with The Machine it births something I find beautiful. The artwork feels like it amplifies me, augments the writing, the exact opposite of replacing me; it has given me an ability to express myself in new ways I didn’t previously have. You prompt The Machine when you give it a task; you collaborate with The Machine when you want to unearth a dream it has inside it. My prompts are weird, and it genuinely feels like a collaborative process when I create art with it.

You can find the first NFT listing of one of my art series here, I listed them because of many requests I got on Twitter. Anyone who buys one gets special consideration for anything I do now and in the future.

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