On Artificial Intelligence

About three times a week, my Abuela will send me a message bursting with pink and red heart-shaped emojis and exclamation marks galore. She’ll wish me buenas noches, TQM, dios te bendiga. Then, coupling the WhatsApp text, she’ll send a picture of something sweet. A Bible verse, a floral setting, a snapshot of Snoopy scribbling something down. I respond to each and every text instantly, adding my own exclamation marks a hundred times over, capping off my response with a couple of heart hands. I find with me and my Abuela’s weird, half-there, half-not language barrier, that those messages have brought us closer. 

I smile, each and every time I take one it. 

And only wince, a little, when I see that the image is AI.

Artificial intelligence has been around for a while now, and seems to have taken center stage recently, with Google having an automatic AI overview to summarize an answer for your search, and teachers citing ChatGPT anytime they address cheating in a classroom. The subject has come into full focus, and many creative types have been left anxious, fearing that question we’ve all heard a million times over by now, staring at AI generated cats and ducks and Snoopys: Will AI replace artists?

First, the definition of “replace” has to be determined. Is “replace” saying that AI could serve as a total substitute for creative minds? That everything a person can accomplish as an artist could be easily replicated by a machine? After a quick google search, I’ve determined replace to simply mean “take the place of.” With that definition, for me, it’s easy to answer this question. 

No. Absolutely not. 

Once, for a friend’s birthday, I made her a pink toilet out of cardboard. It was small, sort of clunky, and definitely missing a few splotches of paint. On the inside of the toilet, on the inside of the seat, was a picture of my friend group. It was a silly gift, made to make my friends snicker. If you saw the gift, you’d see the pale pink painted surface, the near-transparent wrapping paper around the lego flowers I also bought, and the thin ribbon tying the pastel ensemble together. What you couldn’t see was the hour I spent covering it in paint, using a small brush to capture the edges and a large one to paint the sides. You couldn’t hear the snip of the scissors, carefully carving out the photo of my friend group, the technical beeps and jargon of the printer, as I printed out the picture three times to get the right size. You couldn’t see my brother point to a strange toilet toy, in the Kid’s aisle at Target, telling me I should get that for my friend. You didn’t see me snatch up the lego flowers, and determine the rest of the gift, picturing all the humor we’d exchanged in the past, and pressing it into the gift with my fingerprints and torn tape and lingering laughs. 

Art is regurgitation. Taking your experiences, stepping on glass while learning to surf and watching hydrogen peroxide foam around the line of a cut, the diagonal slice of red or green through traffic lights if you squint at them in the dark, the shock, buzz, in your whole body after seeing your Mami’s face collapse in the side mirror, you take those churning moments, and turn them into something else. It’s what you learn in AP physics. No energy can be destroyed, only transformed. You take every splinter, paper cut, jellyfish sting, wilted bouquet, cicada song, sticky summer, caught breath, dry mouth, and you let it shape into something else. 

AI can create an image. But you can draw the way your house looks in your mind, sketching parts of it smaller and bigger subconsciously, because you remember what it felt like to bang your head on the counter after your first real growth spurt, because you remember how you would wake up at midnight and crawl into your parent’s bed so you could fall back asleep sleep. AI didn’t. AI cannot live. It cannot exhale in august air, cannot kick its feet in the cold pool, cannot wince when the kid beside you spits on the grass, cannot experience the swoop of your stomach when you swing too high. AI can draw a house. But you felt a home. 

To summarize: Art is taking what you’ve lived through and repurposing it, the ultimate act of recycling. Ai cannot repurpose what it’s lived through, because it has not lived. 

 It can steal. It can read, it can watch, it can create pictures of paintings of grandeur that can take a person’s whole life to create. But that’s the thing. AI will never have a life behind it. Its imperfections will never lead to a story, they will be purposeful, constructive. There will be no improvised moments, no inside jokes, no experience, behind the colors and profiles and faces. It is just Ai: Unalive, and unreal. 

My abuela will send me an AI image of Snoopy. It’s cute, but strange, uncanny. It’ll leave me a little hollow. Because it shows that there will be things Ai art can chip away at, certainly jobs that might be at risk, valid fears, for creative careers, in this odd, adjusting time.

But I'll send her a message, anyway. I’ll cap it off with heart hands. Because I know that when I draw Snoopy, it’s thinking of the uncle who used to work at NASA, who always made his family coffee, whose favorite color was a sky blue.

Art is meaning. Experience. Life.

And that, at least, is irreplaceable.