Excerpt
Continuing the narrative on Cartesian faith and Weizenbaum’s Eliza (Gill, 39.1), it should perhaps not come as a surprise that it is the artists who are turning their gaze on the modern-day Eliza of ChatGPT faith, and providing an alternative holistic vision. We meet the famous British artist, Stephen Fry (
2023) who makes us aware of the unfolding of OpenAI drama of ChatGPT. He cites the artist Nick Cave, that ChatGPT in rejecting the notion of the collective, not only rejects the human spirit that underpins ‘our existence and connects us all through our mutual striving.’ but also “rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning.” In doing so, it contributes to fast tracking of the ‘commodification of the human spirit by mechanizing the imagination,’ and works towards eliminating ‘the process of creation and its attendant challenges, viewing it as nothing more than a time-wasting inconvenience that stands in the way of the commodity itself.’ In response to the question whether AI can write a great song, Cave (Fry ibid.) says that that genuine songs arise out of suffering where ‘grief and love are forever intertwined,’ and arise from the ‘complex, internal human struggle of creation.’ But ‘ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it does not have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend.’ Beyond these limits of collective connections and human spirit, we get a glimpse of contextual, territorial limits of these AI tools, when scientists, humanists and artists collaborate in envisioning a lived world full of wonders and creativity. Cardona and Kluszczyński (
2020), gives us a glimpse of an evolving dialogue among scientists, humanists and artists who address pivotal issue of past, present and future in which things evolve. In pursuing these dialogues, it becomes our ethical responsibility to understand the origins and limits of AI tools such as ChatGPT. However, this requires a change in our perspective on the way we humans perceive our surroundings, not from the Cartesian point of view, and not from the abstract composition of commodified beings, but from our ‘surroundings at eye level’. In doing do, we may grasp the limits of the Cartesian ‘montage’ that has ‘conquered the way we believe we perceive our surroundings and connected spaces.’ In following Cardona’s argument, we note that the concept of connectivity that gathers datasets from different circumstances and then making it as part of the whole, just as the ChatGPT does, undermines the very concept of the collective that enshrines human communication. In citing Ingold’s commentary on soundscape, the author makes us aware of the complexity of human communication that is not accessible to ChatGPT. Ingold’s argument is that ‘the environment that we experience, know and move around is not sliced up along the sensory way’. For Ingold, ‘sound like breath, is experienced as a movement of coming and going, inspiration and expiration’, and in this we see the body becomes ‘ensounded’, as it sings, hums, whistles and speaks. Further, ‘Just as we use our eyes to watch and look, so we use our ears to listen and we go forth in the world’. Ears just like the eyes are ‘organs of observation and not instruments of playback of data sets.’ Although there is always a need to revisit, re-examine and reformulate concepts in which humans are at the centre stage, we should be mindful of the limits of Cartesian mind–body dualism and dangers of detaching ourselves from these bodily ‘ensounded experiences’, thereby turning ourselves into a ‘sort of collective intelligent organism reflecting on its own’ techno-centric agency of AI systems and tools. …
