Current AI systems like Sora and ChatGPT cannot produce meaningful art because more than half of art takes place in the mind and emotions of the viewer. These systems do not and cannot emulate this, and so the randomness they produce is always done in a contextual vacuum.
You can feed Toni Morrison in, but you won't get Toni Morrison out because they system does cannot emulate the mind of a reader as it produces output the way a human can. It can only emulate the appearance, not the emergent property of the effect of the art.
Eventually, machines will be able to do this. But when a machine is capable of creating art by knowing and emulating the human experience inside itself, it will not be a machine anymore. It will be something more. And that is far beyond our systems' current capacities.
Truly unique human writing requires a presence of mind while writing. I don't just produce words, I imagine and emulate how those words will be received. Innovation comes from knowing a text might produce one effect, and mutating it to surprise, to twist the known into the unknown
The reason ChatGPT is so adept at creating business writing - resumes, emails, etc, is because we've allowed these to be devoid of humanity, homogenized and sterilized. They are not art, they're procedures, easily learned, a flattened emotional topography. True art exists beyond just it's medium
Salman Rushdie's latest book Knife is a philosophical treatise exploring his recent stabbing. This book is more than text. It is an exercise in empathy, a text which involves the real emotions of someone trying to take your life and an author seeking to understand them, to connect with them
