Sight Unseen / Brandon A. Evans

The thief of labor and humanity

Waiting in line at a theme park can be very frustrating—it isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it certainly isn’t a highlight.

Which makes it such a special treat when you manage to beat the system: if you get to a park early enough, or late enough, or on the exact right day, you can get on pretty much anything you want. How many roller coasters you ride depends on how fast you can get to the next one and walk through the empty queue.

But, I’ve found, the high doesn’t last. It doesn’t take very long for the rides to seem less fulfilling somehow. It starts to feel cheaper: racing along from one heart-pounding adventure to another. It feels like eating only candy for dinner.

It turns out there is some kind of reward in waiting at least a little bit for something. There is time to anticipate, to earn, even to relish the previous experience. Time to breathe and calm down and build the suspense.

Life is like that in many ways, and one of them is in the act of creating something. Writing, for example, takes work. It takes frustration and failure and time. The same with any kind of art.

Which is why many people now create with prompts: they feed their good ideas into a machine and let artificial intelligence produce a slick result. AI can take a few sentences and turn them into a letter; it can spin an amusing thought into a silly video for your friends; transform a simple drawing into a nearly flawless painting.

But in doing so something is lost. There is a humanity in the labor, in the work of creation, that is stolen from us by AI. There’s a joy in the effort—a gift of self in it.

And using AI isn’t the same as the work done by a team, where the ideas and the implementation come from different people working in tandem. There, the human element is expanded by each person bringing talents to the table and sharing credit for the work.

Conversely, credit is not often shared with AI. One person’s name is on the work while such recognition is not theirs to claim. AI is becoming an invisible, unfeeling and cheap workforce; a partner who is never really there; an idea that is only a ghost.

Even using AI to merely draft something to be later vetted can be a temptation that pulls us in deeper than we intended to go. Many, very many, people now use it to invent ideas themselves out of whole cloth.

At that point it is not just the human labor of creation that is lost, but the humanity of the thing entirely.

To cede wholly the task of reading and writing and drawing conclusions is to cheat profoundly. It leaves a hollow where a soul ought to be.

When people read a novel, they are really reading a mind. They are jumping into the thoughts of another person, into the world as that person sees it and also of worlds beyond. We treasure great works of art in part because of who made them. Personhood cannot be stripped of art unless we want it to become mere “content” for us to consume as “users.”

To use AI in creating Christian thought and reflection and art is to compound the transgression exponentially.

Evangelization is the movement of the word of God from one person to another; it is organic; it is the transmission of a holy virus. It can only happen between human souls—souls which then live as the collective Body of Christ and become strengthened by physical sacraments in person.

To let a program act as a disciple—even if that program were to have all of human knowledge poured into it—is a poverty, and a failure of Christian imagination. Grace cannot be conjured by invention.

AI has remarkable potential in recording and analyzing scientific data—from astronomy and physics to medicine and computing (to name a few). It has the ability to bring inventions of convenience and safety to us, and even to point out things our fallible brains may have missed.

But unleashing it upon the arts—both written and visual—is to make AI not only the thief of labor but also the destroyer of culture.

Coming up with ideas is hard work, and even harder still is bringing them into the world. But it is good work, and necessary work, and without it something real fades into a pale shadow of itself.

The greatest things in life are worth waiting for, and sometimes for a very long time. They are worth being real, and alive, and fully human.
 

(Sight Unseen is an occasional column that explores God and the world. Brandon A. Evans is the online editor and graphic designer of The Criterion and a member of St. Susanna Parish in Plainfield.) †