The Empathy Telescope

AI "art" and Pope Francis' letter on literature

With the rise of generative AI such as chatGPT, AI writing tools, and writers at the highest levels taking a stand against AI writing, many creators and consumers alike wonder: what’s all the fuss about?

Awful AI art created by Substack’s own generative AI feature. I don’t know why the robot is stroking the paper, or why there’s an old-fashioned well on its desk, and neither does anyone else, especially the tool that created it!

As a community of creators, incensepunk (seemingly ironically, perhaps) firmly opposes the use of AI to replace the efforts of human creativity. But why? Aren’t we just fighting the tide, or acting like Luddites (not to get into the misappropriation of what the historical Luddites actually stood for)?

Last month, Pope Francis published a letter on the topic of literature in faith formation. In the letter, he outlines the value of reading literature, explicitly including poetry and fiction. 

While the letter doesn’t address AI art directly, it does presuppose the human element in subcreation, and the benefits Francis lists throughout the text are only relevant if another thinking, feeling, ensouled human is on the other end of what we’re reading.

For example:

Literature proves essential for believers who sincerely seek to enter into dialogue with the culture of their time, or simply with the lives and experiences of other people.

If we are reading literature created by a machine matching input with expected output—no matter how complexly—no dialogue with other cultures or experiences occur. It’s the illusion of a dialogue, conversation with a parrot that mimics what it has heard but grasps no meaning to the words it speaks.

Later, Francis hints at the concept of “subcreation” (a term I’ve already used above):

For Christians, the Word is God, and all our human words bear traces of an intrinsic longing for God, a tending towards that Word.

Subcreation, coined by JRR Tolkien, describes the inclination of humans to create within the world, itself created by God, as part of our nature as the images and likenesses of God.

AI content has no such divine origin. It does not create as a natural means to mimic its creator. It combines (one could even say, plagiarizes) without intent that which others have created.

As far as content is concerned, we should realize that literature is like “a telescope”, to use a well-known image of Marcel Proust. As such, it is pointed at beings and things, and enables us to realize “the immense distance” that separates the totality of human experience from our perception of it.

If literature is a telescope that teaches us empathy, AI writing is a backwards telescope: making that which is close appear farther than it is. It strips us of our ability to create, replaces artists whose time and creativity should be rewarded, and steals art and art styles without crediting its sources. It creates gulfs between humans by pushing us ever further into our nucleated lives, one more area where human connection is replaced by unthinking, unchallenging machines…

We must never forget how dangerous it is to stop listening to the voice of other people when they challenge us! We immediately fall into self-isolation; we enter into a kind of “spiritual deafness”, which has a negative effect on our relationship with ourselves and our relationship with God, no matter how much theology or psychology we may have studied.

…because AI doesn’t challenge us. It tells us only what we tell it to tell us. In fact, one of the most common ways to circumvent an AI tool’s limitations is to simply tell it not to have those limitations.

Francis’ letter does an excellent job at calling out the importance of humans connecting, and the ways in which literature can be one piece of that necessary component to life.

Hopefully, here I have shown why machines can’t and shouldn’t replace humans in the creative process. There’s many other arguments to be made against AI (my favorite quote about AI art: I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.), but for today, I’ll just stay focused on the spiritual aspect.

For more musings on AI, see:

AI Priests, the Butlerian Jihad, and Human Dignity

Finally, I’ll let His Holiness wrap us with another reminder of why we writers go through all the pain we do:

Literature can greatly stimulate the free and humble exercise of our use of reason, a fruitful recognition of the variety of human languages, a broadening of our human sensibilities, and finally, a great spiritual openness to hearing the Voice that speaks through many voices.