Morality and humanity of Art in AI era

When I was in the ninth standard, I am not sure whether my Hindi teacher, Kokcha Sahab, was quoting the French literary theorist Roland Barthes when he said that the meaning of a literary work lies not in the author’s intent but in the reader’s interpretation. Yet this thought has stayed with me for nearly half a century as Kokcha Sahab’s own insight.  

Now, to make the matter more intriguing, Dhiraj Singh  (धीरज सिंह) has sent us a thought-provoking article exploring how artificial intelligence is reshaping creativity. While sharing it, he remarked that art once derived its moral strength from the journey of the personal to the universal—until AI arrived, dissolving the personal and making everything seemingly universal. His essay compels us to reflect on this shift and to engage with the dilemmas that have emerged in the creative world with the rise of AI.

Morality and humanity of Art in AI era

Dhiraj Singh

Literary and artistic capabilities were among the key qualities that define what it means to be human. Yet, Generative AI models can instantly produce  an ‘above average’ poem, story, novel, painting print or a song. "Above average’ is a place where much of the  literary output, as we know, can be placed. Reaching this level of quality  is now easily possible for generative AI systems such as ChatGPT or Gemini. An expertly crafted AI text can easily satisfy the already shrinking reading appetite of the general public. 

There is a real possibility that our remaining desire for ‘man made’ literature or imagery will be swamped by or satiated by artificially created flood of words and images. So, it is very likely that readership will remain intact not because of human creativity but because people will still find a steady supply of polished AI content. Our hunger for art and literature may be genuine but naturally, it adapts to what is available. Much of what we consume with a notion of free choice is often simply a function of whatever is made available by the supposedly efficient and impartial market. While readers’ illusion of choice and quality may remain, there is a need to examine what an AI infused world means for the creators and for the artistic process especially its deeply non-commercial aspects. 

Call of artistic glory

The process of artistic creation involves making an intensely personal experience into something that resonates with the universal. This resonance passes through a common pool of collective memories of a community or even perhaps humanity. An individual artist can have millions of ideas that float like strands in ether and evaporate. Only those ideas that are called in by this collective memory pool turn into a story or art. Writer Nirmal Verma rightly says that what is called in for artistic treatment is not dependent on the skills of the writer, it simply has to resonate with the collective and is invited in. Only after an experience is admitted in the realm of collective myths and memories, and only after that, skills of the artists come into play and artistic output takes shape. Only those strands of personal experience that enter this realm are able to become universal myths from the experience of one single individual. Personal is not art till it gets the heft of the universal myth. Kafka writes:  

“It is very conceivable that the glory of life is available to everyone and always in its fullness, but imposed, deep, invisible, very far. But it lies there, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you call her by the right word, by the right name, she comes. That is the essence of magic, which does not create, but calls.”

Moral imperative of art

Nirmal Verma calls it a moral imperative of art as it is produced with a dynamics of interaction between personal and universal and is not an ‘aesthete's exercise’ of art for art’s sake. It passes through the shared alleys of human experience and memories. AI bypasses this all. In AI, there is no Kafka’s ‘calling her by right word’ or Nirmal Verma’s moral imperative where a personal experience which is able to knock and get admittance in the collective realm to be sculpted into a piece of art and literature by the skills of the artist. 

Artists are differentiated by their sensibilities. Sensibility of an artist is a gift, a taste or inclination that has a little better chance to resonate with the universal of the collective psyche due to its depth and refinement. These tastes or sensibilities help in having rich experiences which in turn are called in by the creative realm constructed by the alchemy of collective memories. There, being helped by the forces of collective consciousness, that rich, invited experience finds its concrete shape as an art form.  This ‘knocking of the door’, Nirmal Verma continues, will yield results in the context of our decisions or lack thereof, courage, confusion or cowardice. Through all this we invoke the god of the art form. It is this delineation of art form gaining life through its engagement with the vicissitudes of life, that gives art and literature its moral timber. 

It is tempting to think that the AI models represent collective consciousness as they have scraped and soaked in the vast content of Internet. With their ‘skills’ similar to artistic feel and their abilities in analysis, recall, assimilation, configuration and formal structural composition - qualities somewhat resembling artistic sensibility—large language models (LLMs) now appear capable of genuine creative work. And they are doing it better every passing day. What is missing and troublesome is the absence of the process and artistic struggle of going from personal to universal. Output may sound similar but it will lack the ‘moral timber’. 

Accessible rarity of art

Furthermore,  the struggle, unpredictability of the artistic process of turning something personal into a thing of beauty and value with universal appeal makes art both accessible and rare. Difficulty and layered churning lead to less output which is nearer to the unique experience and skills of the artist. A handcrafted product is closer to the vision and skills of the artists than an industrial product. AI transition is like transition to industrial artistic output. Any such transition leads to overpowering the intimacy of art by the vastness of technology and commerce.  Turning of art and literature into industry may at best be a mixed blessing. In art and literature, rarity is not a problem, maybe the opposite. Art is not a survival essential in the sense clothes, grain, fuel, medicine etc are, where industrial scale is seen to be clearly beneficial For art, beauty and meaning are among key defining features. Industrial design too has its aesthetics and beauty but they are not its primary defining features. This technology-induced distance creates an unbridgeable divide between the personality of the creator and  zeitgeist on the one hand and the creation as a resonant note of interaction between personal and universal. 

Industrial art of the luxury type relies on limited production and marketing to keep a label exclusive. It might be true that when an original design is added to the collection, it is a true reflection of the alchemy of artistic struggle and resonance with the collective. But with every copy, even handcrafted, it moves away from the moment of creation and the personality of its creator. ‘Exclusive’ of luxury commercial brands is very different from ‘unique’ and ‘universal’ of true art. Unique and Universal are key ingredients of what is moral in art. Danger for optional, non-essential (from survival point of view)  areas like art and literature is that they lose what some theorists have called their ‘cultural centrality’ and ‘aesthetic singularity’ when subject to mass production through technological leaps. This happens without the advantages of mass production that accrue to more ‘mundane’ or ‘utility’ items. 

Loss of forgetting

Then, there is this question about the texture of the collective memory as represented by the Large Language Models. It is true that the Internet is the most concrete manifestation of the collective psyche which is ever growing. LLMs have scraped the Internet and are using the data with astonishing results. However, in this AI created collective consciousness nothing ever goes away and excavation of even not so present strands of memory is not that difficult. What used to take painstaking research or a surge of inspiration or arduous archaeological expedition is always available and present. This is materially different from the ‘organic’ collective consciousness of humanity which is layered and uniquely inaccessible. ‘Forgetting’ is as much part of this as remembrance. It takes its texture from the effort that goes into deciphering and getting it. Parts of it are forgotten due to valid formative and structural reasons like disuse or even dangers. When a collective world becomes ever present and ever expanding without the depletion by forgetting and inaccessibility, as happens in the LLMs, its morality and humanity both suffer.  Rules of morality emerge by eliminating the nefarious aspects, at least temporarily, of the shared value system. Profane or sacred are on different pedestals which is not so in LLMs where everything is present everywhere, all the time. 

This accessible, ever-expanding replacement of collective consciousness can easily degenerate into a tool of homogeneity. A major detrimental development of recent times is artistic creation aiming to a representative ‘audience’. This audience is seen to be an ‘average’ of various publics. The experience of members of the masses is not ‘average’ of all experiences. These members may be from similar backgrounds but every individual experience is unique not the ‘average’ of experiences. This average ‘audience’ towards which all the creation is directed by catering to the lowest common denominator is the need of the market. Art, in such a system, is valued for its market value not its innate significance which is difficult to decipher and commodify. 

Hollowing of words and images

As special unique experiences have to rely on the words and images. In today’s world these words and images have been hollowed by the vicious cycle of two-way vacuity of experience and language itself. Words signifying deep meanings and feelings disappear as their ‘signified’ no longer have the currency that they used to have. When language aims to cater to the lowest common denominator, the rare and unique start to lose their significance and mainstream recall. With this goes the mental and emotional muscle that has the capability to enjoy the complexity and depth. With LLMs this catering to the ‘average’ is bound to increase as the Internet is dominated by the elements that aim for virality rather than depth. This undiscerning cesspool is the building material of these LLMs. Furthermore, the homogeneity is bound to increase due to easy accessibility of layers that required extra effort and artistic struggle to parse, giving the creation pool a ‘shock of the new’. Now there is nothing new, nothing shocking, no risk and no anticipation. Unique experience, already rare due to the hollowness of the word and images, gets deprived of the alchemy of inner struggle and voyage of discovery. Humanity’s capacity to go beyond ‘average’ to ‘unique’ and from there to ‘universal’ will be severely stunted in a world of habit formed by AI. 

It is ironic. pre-renaissance world has a common civilization and societal thread in the form of a shared belief system of religion or ethical commonality that was infusing meaning in every act of people. With this world gone, belief giving way to intellect, shared belief giving way to individual convictions, meaning creation became difficult. Fragmentation of lives made it difficult to live a full life. Bubbles of algorithm-driven social media trained the minds away from a shared reality. LLMs, on the other hand, promise return of that shared reality by making a common reality accessible to all. But it is different from the shared thread of Buddha, Adi Shankracharya, Kabir or Gandhi where despite complete absence of media of mass communication, they could reach far and wide in by piggybacking on the shared resonance of community beliefs. By tugging at the common shared thread they could reach every soul like a primal jungle call. LLMs are a dubious replacement of that shared reality. The loss of the old religious-communal belief system led to a vacuum. And as is the wont of vacuums, they rarely get filled with healthy stuff. 

It is difficult to predict the exact path of impact of AI on morality and humanity of the artistic endeavour. Surely, human ingenuity will carve its own pathway. In fact, AI can also be seen as a response to make sense of a superhuman barrage of stimuli, signals.  Messages worth a year come to today’s mind to process in just one hour.  Whatever forces that led to AI and whatever pathways future humanity will forge, the current generations with memories of pre AI even pre-digital times will like to keep some old habits. Surely, with saturation of artificially created output, yearning for human touch will bring back some balance.  However, like religion, which transitioned from infusing meaning to every act of day to day lives to contained settings of churches and temples, today’s artforms too are headed to museums and cult activities rather than staying the everyday ritual which used to guide, light and give meaning to everything. 

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Dhiraj Singh is a distinguished senior civil servant and currently serves as the Director of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune. He harbors a profound passion for the fine arts, including music, painting, films, and literature. Dhiraj has authored three notable books: Modern Masters: A Personal Pantheon - Music, Painting, Television, Literature; Modern Masters of Indian Cinema , and a Hindi poetry collection titled लम्हों के पतझड़ (Lamhon Ke Patjhar).

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