Games

Computers are binary state machines with no reciprocal feedback reinforcement built in. A biological neurological system forms associations with feedback mechanisms reinforced by chemical frequency, gradient and multiple inputs that don't have to be classified or sorted into appropriate i/o setups made by people. A nerve from the back of your brain that associates with your breathing can associate with a group of nerves in the front that associate with smell and memory so your breathing might reflexively shift a little bit if you think of the chlorine smell from swimming in a pool hard enough.

That's to say: being alive over the years creates associations between ideas on ways that aren't entirely logical, and in ways that maybe people don't discuss or think of often. A kind of latent, collective unconscious about experience.

An LLM does not experience (if it experiences at all) associations from weak -> strong. It has no associative history from it's own life what so ever. It takes input, references a data set, picks a response based on probalistic algorithm, and presents it. It doesn't understand how to convey meaning through associating it with its experience like a person. It can be taught /why/ a brush stroke should look the way it does but it doesn't have any capacity to feel that it's correct, and, likewise, capacity to understand how to make it wrong or different on purpose to convey a meaning.

To us, a tree is green because we've seen green trees. We remember the light at the top, the shade at the bottom. We also, based on our own lives, know what the leaves and branches should look like. In a way, an LLM can learn that too from data set, sure. BUT an LLM can't remember it's first tree, it can't tell you that all the pictures of trees it saw in children's books when it grew up looked so much different than the ones it saw outside because it lived somewhere where the trees were Eucalyptus and the rest of the ground was dry.

An LLM won't paint a tree thinking about what it would feel like to touch it, how the wind on its skin feels in the breeze and how the memory of that leads it to construct the subtle splitting of the tree's canopy, how the sound of creaking branches makes it remember to make the branches look weak and spindly like it used to see on walks back from the corner store because this painting is about autumn when the wind picks up when the smell of leaves fills your nose. An LLM might make the sky cloudy because it feels, statistically, the prompt that requested the drawing has clouds but not because thinking of the cool fall air makes it also think of rain clouds and rushing home. And through rushing home you think of deer and add that to the landscape and have it running. And then maybe someone sees your painting with the wind and the storm and the running deer and they get the impression, the vague impression, the ghost of a feeling... "oh boy this painting reminds me of needing to get home before it rains, I better stop by the corner store on my way home" and BAM that's it.

I'm sorry if this is meandering but you're seeing it right? Maybe you've seen people say "soulless" a lot, but I think that's because to people the soul is the sum of our experiences, and there's an inherent universality to certain ideas you just /have/ to be alive for both in the past to experience and in the present to need to use those ideas to stay alive and do things you want. There's certain patterns and associations that always form throughout living and that's the secret sauce to any art imo. Art is a language first and foremost, it conveys meaning, but it relies on these ideas that need time and associations and pressure and varience to build. An LLM doesn't have that capability.

The part that makes art art isn't just the product, it's the fact that a living person with experience made it. Without the fact that another human being intentionally composed the work, there is, automatically, the destruction of linguistic or relational capacity of the work. LLMs do not EXPRESS their ideas because they do not HAVE ideas. Though you /may/ relate with a generated work in some way, there is no connection to anyone who made it. It's factually lesser because it no longer expresses an intention or carries a conveyed meaning. It isn't art anymore because art is expression. LLMs do not express, feel the desire to express or have any experiencial touchstones with which to form expression. It's a math problem and that's it.

Maybe, sometime in the future, they can use software to simulate a brain and the proper neural connections. Maybe even with hardware. Maybe they can scan a human brain down to sub-atomic resolution and run it and it makes art. But AI bros fucking /wish/ their silly little calculators could do something as elegant as hearing a door creak and being reminded of their grandma's house and then thinking "hey I want to make a painting of a dingy wooden house to express to someone that experience".