AI is a double-edge sword—it will improve productivity, and if kept in that lane—will benefit humankind. But a creator of true art? Not so much, because the truth of it — AI has no soul. It can mimic humans, but AI has no human-based instinct, no hormones driving it passionately toward love or hate. By drawing from a million flecks of old thoughts stashed on the internet, it can daub a painting, pen a derivative novel or a formula screenplay, but in the end will humans really care? Did AI draw in a breath at the sight of a lovely bloom on a spring walk? Or shiver at a first kiss?
As I finished my epic journey through Marcel Proust’s À La Recherche du Temps Perdu or In Search of Times Lost [published between 1913-1927], written as a fictional auto-biography, I came to a poignant section as he contemplated his own writing career, grappling with the concept of human context and perception that is unique to each individual. As I read it, it seemed, incredibly, to talk of our current conundrum with Artificial Intelligence.
Marcel Proust, by photographer Otto Wegener
Excerpt from a section of ‘In Search of Times Lost,’ [English translation 1922-1931]:
“…was not nature herself a beginning of art, she who had often allowed me to know the beauty of something only a long time afterwards and only through something else—midday at Combray through the sound of its bells, the mornings at Doncières through the hiccoughs of our hot-water furnace? The relationship may be uninteresting, the objects mediocre and the style bad, but without that relationship there is nothing. The literature that is satisfied merely to ‘describe things,’ to furnish a miserable listing of their lines and surfaces, is, notwithstanding its pretensions to realism, the farthest removed from reality, the one that most impoverishes and saddens us, even though it speak of nought but glory and greatness, for it sharply cuts off all communication of our present self with the past, the essence of which the objects preserve, and with the future, in which they stimulate us to enjoy the past again. But there was more than that, I reflected. If reality were merely that by-product of existence, so to speak, approximately identical from everybody—because, when we say “bad weather, war, cab-stand, brightly-lighted restaurant, garden in bloom,” everyone knows what we mean—if reality were that, then naturally a sort of cinematographic film of these things would be enough and the ‘style’ or ‘literature’ that departed from their simple theme would be an artificial hor d’oeuvre.”
Proust writes that, as an adult, he eats a madeleine cake and dunks it in tea, and is reminded of a vivid childhood memory of the first time he had tasted the cake dunked in tea. These “precious fragments” (term coined by Margold Linton) or involuntary memories can be both pleasant and terrible, and thus he captures these bits of memories within his most famous work.
Proust continues:
“…I perceived that, to describe these impressions, to write that essential book, the only true book, a great writer does not need to invent it, in the current sense of the term, since it already exists in each one of us, but merely to translate it. The duty and task of a writer are those of a translator.”
I believe that Proust was asking a deeply fundamental question—what makes the exquisite words of a line of prose or poetry, a cinematic masterpiece, or a work of art so compelling? It’s not the words or the images in front of us—it wells from the emotions and contextual impressions of our individual past—the joys, the sorrows—the highs of love and the depths of grief—that we’ve experienced in our own lives.
The tsunami of AI is upon us, but we mere humans must not forget that AI is a tool and not a god or super being. At the end of the day, we might well shrug at the bright lights of AI and mumble, “Who cares about the pretty, but sterile pictures AI paints?” And, as beings born of flesh and blood, we’ll go on living and loving like… humans.