Why are people mixing everything up? Since when code has a soul?
AI can be just a tool. You use it the same way you use a keyboard, a computer, a pencil, etc. I'm pretty sure you can build art with it, much like using any tool. People are making art with ascii. You can do art with anything.
But AI can also be much more than a tool, and why can't it have a soul? What's a soul anyway, except something that humans are making up to convince themselves that they are more than flesh and bones? Mythos will not do the same "art" as Fable or Astra would do. AI in 20 years will very likely produce art indistinguishable and as profound as human art. Obviously, humans at that time will always invent new criteria to say why this "art" is not good enough.
Since always, it is often just not recognized. Perhaps the same way how a newspaper article has soul and a fingerprint of the author, though you may not recognize it while reading.
What I find ironic are the "creatives" who declare resolutely that AI cannot create art,... now here is this cool vibe-coded software I've made. It's like saying a chisel cannot create a sculpture. Yeah, OK, but without the chisel the sculpture wouldn't have been made. Who cares. It's a tool. What you do with it is up to you.
If you don't know what a soul is, and you think it's something people just make up, then you are missing out on the experience of being human and you have a bigger problem than not being able to understand what art is.
When you find yourself with a choice between "either this person doesn't understand the experience of being human or I'm not following what they mean" the latter is probably a sound choice.
Not really. I'll warrant I've clocked a lot more time on the planet, done a lot more jobs, lived in a lot more countries, studied a lot more philosophies, religions and languages, and learned the hard way through many more relationships and difficult teachers than most people who've passed through this life.
It's my prerogative to determine, and it's fairly trivial to identify, the difference between someone who has trouble forming their thoughts into words, and someone who like this poster is clearly stating an antagonistic and divorced relationship with life itself.
I'm capable and free to judge. Your knee jerk reaction itself is highly suspicious and redolent of someone else who's going through a divorce with living.
You should always question your own interpretation. Yes. When you find some evidence that you may be misunderstanding someone, then yes, you should certainly default to giving them the benefit of the doubt and ask yourself whether you've misunderstood something. This is pretty basic ethics and rhetoric.
But the meaning of the poster was quite clear. It was absolutist, in fact, and it was nihilistic, derogatory and dismissive toward any notion of intrinsic human value. Wouldn't you agree?
My advice to you would be: When you find yourself intervening in a conversation to support something transparently antihumanistic and evil, by claiming without any basis or merit that the other party in the conversation is misunderstanding it, maybe you should assume that you're failing to understand something.
So whales do not have a soul? Only humans do have one? What about our ancestors? Did the homo erectus have a soul? What about big apes, did they?
I don't need "soul" concept to describe the human experience, and if you use it to describe technology, it only makes things more confusing. It only ends up as an attempt to state that some things are not "good" because they don't match your own vague concept of what is good or bad, without explaining why nor what this is.
I believe whales have a soul. And dogs have a soul. Perhaps even squirrels and rats have a soul.
What's your point, other than that you are misunderstanding the word? It needs no mystical or religious basis. If you have ever played music with someone or shared a difficult experience with a random human/whale/dog/squirrel which transcended transactional or intellectual communication and which caused you to view their interior world as something more than a clockwork sum of parts and neurons, then this is what is meant by "soul". If you want to be purely technological and psychological about it, it's that which emerges from a layer of intelligence that exhibits what Freud would describe as superego. Something that AI does not yet have.
It's only a vague concept if you haven't experienced it.
Sure, but I'm an atheist. I got to being an atheist by growing up in a religious community that I ultimately rejected. But I understand the experience of that which people crave and I understand why they feel sorry for atheists.
I'm not saying a soul is given by God or that one needs to believe anything in order to find a soul in oneself. What I'm saying is that the poster's comment is darkness and hopelessness and a hatred for his own species rolled up into one, and that such a perspective is both painfully inexperienced and profoundly awful for the person and for whoever they are convincing or it, because life contains much more richness (religious or secular) than what is disdained by this person.
What you find condescending in my statement isn't that it's religious, it's that I'm willing to tell them that they're missing out on life. In that respect, I don't mind being condescending, because not all philosophies or ways of living lead to equally happy results.
Is it this fuzzy blob of ineffable experiences, aesthetics, qualia, self-reference, dualism, spirituality and other things? I don't need to reject all this to notice that its fuzziness makes it impossible to operationalize.
No... again a misunderstanding of the word, and a major one!
A soul - and I mean this in the most atheistic, nonreligious sense you can imagine - is what you operationalize every single day when you're faced with hardship or any situation where you'd prefer not to be. It's also the dynamic that makes you feel joy in doing something beyond simple pleasure or happiness.
You know SQL? Think of "soul" as a view of the tables describing your intellectual and physical properties, left joined with your actions, which filters those actions that would otherwise not be simply mechanical or deterministic. Does that help?
Is it that complex? Whatever you feel stays inside you. From the outside you make noises, gestures, facial expressions. We can obtain fMRI data an so on. Operationalization is how to connect observables with the presence of soul in a subject.
What can you say besides "I don't feel a soul inside an LLM"? You don't feel it? OK, good for you, whatever.
Isn't one of the main attractions to art the skill required to create it? If anyone can create some dodgy AI picture, it ceases to have the same, if any, value.
> But AI can also be much more than a tool, and why can't it have a soul? What's a soul anyway, except something that humans are making up to convince themselves that they are more than flesh and bones?
I’m finding this fascinating personally. The lines people are drawing to try and keep themselves inside some definition they can mark as special.
No need to go to Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, once required reading in many a school where I'm from; the logical conclusion and application of polysemy [1], amongst other things, should get the ball rolling just as well.
The banana isn't the art. The art is placing the banana in a gallery and art market context to make a funny and ironic comment about the gallery and art market context.
Programming is a craft. It's not an art, because creating code doesn't comment on, criticise, challenge, distill, or otherwise have anything to do with any human experience outside of programming.
Where’s the contradiction?? X can be just Y, and X can be much more than Y. No contradiction, just an observation that you can use it one way or another.
Nothing ever is just a tool. Saying that X "can just be a tool" is a fundamental violation of that statement; saying then "X can be much more than just a tool" is a violation in form of a contradiction. It's very easy to parse...
AI can be just a tool. You use it the same way you use a keyboard, a computer, a pencil, etc. I'm pretty sure you can build art with it, much like using any tool. People are making art with ascii. You can do art with anything.
But AI can also be much more than a tool, and why can't it have a soul? What's a soul anyway, except something that humans are making up to convince themselves that they are more than flesh and bones? Mythos will not do the same "art" as Fable or Astra would do. AI in 20 years will very likely produce art indistinguishable and as profound as human art. Obviously, humans at that time will always invent new criteria to say why this "art" is not good enough.