What is the fundamental flaw of AI?
Recently, someone sent me AI-generated art and said, “How cool is that?” I looked at it, showed it to my wife, and we both said, “It looks kind of dead.”
It’s so mathematically perfect that there’s no life in it.
I immediately imagined myself seeing that picture in an art gallery hanging next to Monet. No comparison.
No doubt, AI-generated art is okay in the sense that it looks like art. But it’s not properly art. Because art is not created mathematically. It’s created inspirationally. It has a soul.
AI-generated “art” may look perfect, but it’s dead because it’s soulless. It cannot have a soul because no one inspired it.
It takes inspiration to have a soul. AI-generated content may read fine, even perfect, but is it food for the soul?
I experimented with ChatGPT, asking it to create a short story based on Russian folklore. It came out fine, readable, passable, recognizable characters that I knew from my childhood, but it was drab and meaningless.
But why? What is the fundamental flaw of AI?
The answer is deeply philosophical and spiritual – not technical or mathematical.
According to Martin Buber, there are two ways of relating to the world. One is called “I-It,” and the other “I-Thou.”
The “I-It” model is seeing the world as separate from myself. It’s literally “I” and “It.” There’s no connection. I am a subject, and the world is an object out there.
I can only observe it from the outside, gather data about it, measure it, and conceptualize it.
In the “I-It” pattern, we believe we only know something when we have studied it externally by amassing data about it. If I gather all the data about the Sun, I know what the Sun is. If I gather all the data about that person, I know what that person is.
But do I really know that person by collecting data about them? No. I have only created a mental concept of that person based on the data collected and mistaken that concept for reality.
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