I’m going to be writing a lot more about AI, among other things.

In part this is because a nearly unfathomable investment is being made into this technology,. Huundreds of billions of dollars being poured into a very particular set of tools, based on the idea that AI represents a thing of essentially infinite value: harnessable intelligence.

This itself is a bit of a strange proposition since there are eight billion humans on our planet, intelligent creatures with minds well-suited to a wide variety of forms of intellectual, creative, and artistic work. Even if one imagines that we could create an electronic appliance that thinks as well as a human (and I’m deeply skeptical of this, but that’s a different post), there isn’t a clear case for swapping out a human and swapping in a machine intelligence. 

(A fair amount of this fantasy rests on the idea that machine intelligence will be “better” than human intelligence at accomplishing everyday tasks. There’s no reason to assume this is true.)

Maybe we should take some time to think about the story of mechanical “superiority” here: It has been true since at least the invention of wallpaper that a mechanical process of reproduction of visual art is a faster and cheaper way to put artistic decoration on a wall. Wallpaper printing is, in my experience, a pretty good analogy for AI text and image creation: it is only possible for factories that have ingested existing designs to create wallpaper images. They are mechanically produced. They can be subtly redesigned. They are repetitive but spew out in vast quantities. They enable many people to benefit from the work of a single artist, or allow mediocre approximations of art to take up vastly more wall space than was possible before that technology. But ultimately, wallpaper printing factories are not a replacement for visual artists. At their best, they are a tool for visual artists to multiply their impact, and at their worst, their mediocre products crowd out space for pleasing art.

Art endures. But perhaps fewer of us engage in it because we can so readily put the art of others on our walls. 

But even that is a choice that each of us can readily reverse in a heart beat. I’m sitting in a room where most of the visuals within in my line of sight—a painting by a friend of my sister’s from a half century ago, a weaving of a landscape from Sorata  Bolivia, a square canvas with the words HOME SWEET HOME sketched out in pencil, two of my father’s paintings made in his eighties—were crafted by hand, and a handful of others are  prints. But among them sit four dozen books, each filled with tiny reprints of visual art from the Egyptian pyramids to revolutionary poster makers to early twentieth century animators to Afro-Futurists.

The technology of mechanical reproduction did not end the age of art.

Each book on my living room shelf is a cabinet of curiosities, but that doesn’t remove any of the awe from my children or myself visiting an actual museum or artist studio.

Likewise, the technology of text synthesis will not end of age of human thinking.