Why there will never be an 'AI-rtist'

AI can perform a lot of 'useful things', but as time ticks on, we (and Wall Street) are also starting to better understand its limitations.

Writing in The New Yorker, Ted Chiang has a great piece that muses on the possibility that AI will replace artists, and (spoiler alert) concludes that this is just not possible.

It's not possible for ontological reasons; machines are not conscious, what they produce has the form of what we would recognise as 'art' or 'prose', but that output does not come pre-loaded with any meaning. Art is 'meaning communicated through a visual expression'. Only conscious beings are capable of experiencing meaning, so what AI is creating is just the illusion of intelligence.

It's important to keep abreast of the discussion around artificial intelligence so as to not be wilfully blindsided by rapid discontinuities on either side (broadly) of its potential forward trajectory into the future. Hence the sharing of Mr Chiang's relevant perspective here for your own mental library.

For us, the article sparked another line of thought that may help save a lot of time in another way...

For many of us, as much as it is a seemingly easy tool to fast track a lot of the grunt work that needs to be taken care of on a daily basis, what is also highlights is just how inefficient and pointless a lot of our seemingly important daily work is. If a machine that doesn't understand what it is producing can simply produce copy to satisfy a box being ticked, then what's the point of the box being there in the first place?

If bullshit does the job well enough, then the job itself was bullshit in the first place.

AI should be seen as a valuable reason to not waste time producing junk. If that report you are writing could be done by AI - then the report itself is useless and should be discontinued. If the strategy that you are busy writing could be completed by AI - then perhaps it's not a strategy that is needed but a different focus all together.

Human effort should be reserved for creating something of real value, not filling up time or satisfying the whims of administrators who aren't going to read what gets produced in any case.

Without it needing to be any more capable - [BREAKING NEWS] AI has already freed us all to be artists and to take personal pride in our work.