When members of the Writer's Guild of America went on strike in May of this year, one of their demands was to regulate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) on projects covered by the Guild's minimum basic agreement. They would like guarantees that AI won’t be used to write or rewrite literary material and won’t be used as source material, and that material covered by the agreement won’t be used to train AI. From a psychological point of view, the potential takeover of the creative arts by AI raises a further question: Will we unwittingly lose out on the power of art to console us?
Programs affected by the WGA strike include late-night talk shows such as "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" on CBS, "Jimmy Kimmel Live" on ABC, "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" on NBC, and "Late Night With Seth Meyers" on NBC. These programs have always relied on human writers for content such as nightly monologues. But with the rise of artificial intelligence, AI-written monologues can be easily pieced together. I asked an AI chatbot to "write a joke about the American debt ceiling" (topical in the United States at the time of the strike). This is what the bot returned:
Q: What do you call it when the American debt ceiling has been reached?
A: A fiscal cliffhanger!
"'Fiscal cliffhanger' sounds like a movie that would be exciting and suspenseful, but, in this case, it is about the American debt ceiling," wrote the AI chatbot when asked to explain why the joke is funny.
Technologists usually frame AI creativity as a technical problem. They ponder whether human creativity will be fully replicated by future AI. But this way of framing the issue misunderstands the function of creativity for human beings.
Classical psychoanalysis gave us the insight that one of art's essential functions is to console us. Because we live at a time when we have come to expect immediate gratification, this insight can seem alien to us. But taking a step back and viewing things from a philosophical point of view, it begins to make sense.
The world is not—and cannot be—what we wish it to be. Human life is inevitably replete with dissatisfaction. For this reason, it is an achievement for a human being to find a path through life that brings some level of satisfaction without relying on reality-distorting mechanisms of self-deception or patterns of behavior that aim at escaping reality outright.
The creative arts are an adaptive means of coping with life and attaining a degree of satisfaction through the use of the imagination. The arts serve a consoling function: While we are faced with inhabiting a world that can seem indifferent to individual happiness, at least we can partake in the pleasures of art.
Artists who are capable of producing imaginative works can use their talent as a means of adapting to the emotional challenges of the human predicament. When we are part of their audience, we share in the imaginative worlds they create, and this helps us in a similar way. As Richard Wollheim puts it in his classic book on aesthetics, Art and Its Objects, "[b]y means of his achievement the artist can open to others unconscious sources of pleasure which hitherto they had been denied."
But the consoling and even healing functions of art for audience members depend on having a sense of shared humanity with the artist. The point of creativity for human beings is entirely missed when we eliminate the human creator. It is a letdown to learn that a creative product we've invested our energy in appreciating has been produced by something that does not itself undergo human experience and could have no need to be consoled.
AI creativity is novel and exciting and it is understandable for us to be curious about it. There may be ways it can serve as a tool in the production of human art. But when it is used as a replacement for the human imagination in art, it ultimately cannot offer the kind of satisfaction we attain from products of human creativity. This is as true of Hollywood-produced TV and movies as it is of novels, paintings, and the entire range of the creative arts.