AI has being but it does not exist
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Simone de Beauvoir
15 min read
The article heavily draws on Beauvoir's existentialist philosophy, particularly her distinction between 'being' and 'existence.' Understanding her intellectual biography, relationship with Sartre, and development of existentialist ethics provides essential context for the philosophical framework being applied to AI.
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Aufheben
10 min read
The article explicitly contrasts Beauvoir's concept of 'assuming' lack of being with Hegel's 'surpassing' (Aufheben/sublation). Understanding this central Hegelian concept of negation, preservation, and elevation clarifies why Beauvoir's alternative is philosophically significant.
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Thomas Kinkade
18 min read
The article uses Kinkade as a provocative example of human-created work that mirrors 'AI slop.' Understanding Kinkade's controversial status as the 'Painter of Light,' his mass-production methods, and critical reception illuminates the article's point about the difficulty of defining uniquely 'human' creativity.
In the last few weeks Warner Music Group and Disney have partnered with AI firms, and this has left many to fret about “losing human creativity” to AI.
We need to be very careful how we frame “human creativity”, because as scholarship in a range of fields has shown, any time you try to define “the human” in terms of essential qualities or capacities, it’s impossible to fully capture all of the actually living persons that we would commonsensically call human, such as disabled and impaired people, intersex people, people practicing non-Western cultures and their values, just to name a few of the most common exclusions. If you say the thing that defines humans is “language use,” then human babies and some disabled people don’t count but non-human primates who can use sign language do. For the same reason, it won’t work to try to find some objective property of human creativity that distinguishes it from AI. Human creativity is so diverse and varied that it even, in for example the case of Thomas Kinkade, basically mirrors AI slop. Compare Kinkade’s “Rosebud Cottage”
To this AI-generated image on Freepik
We can assume that Kinkade’s body of work has been used to train these image generators, but the point is Kinkade came up with this cheesy stuff all on his own! With his human brain and creativity! There is a lot of human-made slop out there, some of it, like Kinkade’s, is even extremely practiced and refined.
When it comes to distinguishing between “humans” and AI, existential phenomenology offers what I think is the most helpful and accurate toolkit. Specifically, I think Beauvoir’s distinction between “being” and “existence” can distinguish between people and artificially intelligent machines: AI has being, but it does not exist because it’s not a mutual participant in the co-creation of existence.
As an existentialist, Beauvoir thinks that humans have no essential being, i.e., that human “being is lack of being” (13); that’s her way of saying something like “existence before essence (aka being).” Because I have no essential being, I can shape my existence in any way my situation facilitates. For example, human bodies can’t fly like birds or swim like fish, but by working together we figured out how to build airplanes and SCUBA diving equipment; we considered the material affordances and limitations of typical human bodies and figured out how to make them
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