Pope Leo XIV recently tweeted that there is “an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can produce through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by other people.”
As a description of how the current model works, it’s fair enough. AI learns to paint by looking at our paintings.
Paul Graham (also a painter!) notes that this is about to change. Robots connected to the world will be self-aware. A robot or AI that learns from its own sensors does not borrow images from others. LLMs are founded on our words but words will dominate the future.
So picture the robot on the beach at dusk. He watched the sun go down, then painted what he saw. Is it art? The Pope no doubt still insists on the ontological difference. But if the factual difference between borrowing and perceiving disappears, what makes it more than a statement of faith?
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