| | I am constantly amazed and captivated by the beautiful and surprising images that AI can generate through prompt input. The images are not only harmonious but often also unexpected.
This combination is reminiscent of the human capacity to create art through imagination.
The AI simply recombines existing images and templates found online in a way that appeals to human viewers.
Even today, this recombining of existing images can result in bizarre details. For example, daffodils might sprout from a living room table, and a cat lying in wait outside a mouse hole might be simultaneously pierced by the bars of the cage separating it from the mouse hole.
Yet none of these errors in the AI-generated images seem out of place; nothing appears to disturb the serene idyll. Everything is correct, nothing is true. But how does this paradox arise?
We live in a time where AI systems are not only admired but viewed as a kind of intellectual authority, because AI supposedly unites all knowledge – from science and literature to art and music. AI is seen, in a sense, as a superior voice of human culture and science.
But appearances are deceiving. While human knowledge—and ignorance, as well as numerous misunderstandings—has developed over millennia in a constant interplay between humans, their environment, and nature, AI has no practical experience and, in a sense, starts from scratch with the current state of knowledge and culture, along with its current misunderstandings.
Our "today" is the informative zero hour of AI.
Moreover, the AI has no sensory capabilities whatsoever. It is blind, deaf, unable to feel, touch, taste, or smell. In a figurative sense, it is severely disabled in multiple ways.
And yet, there is a commonality between the pseudo-creativity of AI and human mental activity: dreaming. When people dream, they create worlds that seem fantastical to themselves, which they perceive as absolute reality while asleep.
In doing so, dreamers recombine all sorts of experiences and perceptions from their own lives, from everyday occurrences and critical life events to banal film and television scenes. Everything merges into the dreamer's subjective world without being true in a general sense.
In fact, no dreaming person has ever experienced a real world that is identical to the dream world.
This is where it intersects with AI. Without ever having seen anything, it creates collages of image elements that it cannot see or perceive. And yet, it offers statistically generated random worlds that appear plausible to AI on a mathematical basis.
A fanciful dream world, so to speak. The only problem is that, in case of doubt, the AI cannot distinguish which world is real.
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