Originality and Humanity

This is a short bit of thinking-out-loud from the Orthosphere, which isn't wholly wrong; I just want to take a moment to point out that it isn't entirely right, either. The Aristotelian tradition, so important to Aquinas et al, shows us why. Tolkien cements the picture.

How do you tell whether what you are reading was generated by AI, or by real humans (or, for that matter, other real spirits)?

What has been generated by real substantive beings is somehow original, somehow new, and somehow unsuspected in what has already transpired. What has been generated by mechanical procedures cannot be that. It must by comparison seem relatively boring, stupid, or repetitive.

How to tell the difference between creative originality and repetitive stupidity?

In the end, it seems to me that it must come down to something like smell. We don’t smell rot or poison on the basis of a process of ratiocination. Indeed, most of our apprehensions of falsehood or error arise not from some discursive procedure, but rather from a relatively raw intuition; a hunch, a stink, an unease, a horror.

Genuine originality is not what human beings' arts are for. As Aristotle points out, the function of art is to perfect nature. We know what an eye is for by applying reason, which we have by nature; once we know that, we can tell if the eye is performing its function well or badly. I was just at the eye doctor this week, so that he can apply the art of optics to perfecting what nature aims at but did not fully achieve (mostly because I read too much and have thus trained my eyes towards nearsightedness). 

That link just above is to an SEP article on Aristotle's aesthetics, which is in fact where the Orthosphere is going too. 

If something seems off to you, not so much wrongly (we can after all disagree honestly about facts and their reasons) as oddly or weirdly, it probably is.

Or fake or ghey; that, too, is a good indicator. What seems hard to entertain prima facie is … hard to entertain.

This should be the tell, actually, that the 'smell' metaphor works but that the article has pointed it wrongly. It is not the lack of originality that makes AI fail to 'smell' right, but the lack of connection to nature. The AI can't see nature. It can only see human reflections of nature that we have trained it on. It is more disconnected from the true thing that art exists first to understand, and then to perfect. 

I don't think AI had much to do with what he's calling 'fake or ghey'; mostly I think that was bad artists, human enough but also misunderstanding that the perfection of nature is the true teacher and target for art. That is why such art seems fake; it isn't tied to the real thing, which is the natural function and purpose that our reason discovers. 

Or, as Tolkien put it, it falls to us to be subcreators. In the Silmarillion, he proposes a creation story in which the god-figure creates with a song that all of his angel-figures are supposed to join in. Mostly they do, creating a harmonic beauty. One of them, the devil-figure, begins to introduce his own discordant notes. The creator is able to alter the work so that the discord deepens and improves the beauty of the whole; and thus the devil-figure is not able to disrupt the overall beauty of created nature as he had willed to do.

Subcreation happens within the context of the natural, to include natural reason's understanding of it and response to it. Only by accepting this do we properly perform the human arts, which adjust and perfect the natural good. We might be original at times, as perhaps the inventor of optical lenses was, but what is good or great about what we do is not the originality. It is the perfection of the natural good that we ourselves did not create.