from the desk of the Master of Buckland, Took Hall
I.
O fickle Muse!
Scattered about my desk are the notes, scribblings, and drafts, of at least half a dozen not-as-yet completed letters I would have liked to have sent to you by now… And then when I had given up all hope, not to mention thought, of writing anymore, the Spirit alighted on me and I had the next letter ready, just needing to be put to paper.
I suppose I was just trying too hard. I often find that it is when we stop trying that the things we set out to do happen. Do I mean to say that you should not try? On one level, no. At the highest level, we must strive to win the great battles set before us… But at the small scale, often loosening our grip accomplishes what we had so hard been trying to accomplish with clenched fists. So I suppose you might say it's ‘do without trying’. You will of course, as a well-read young man, recognise this as being terribly close to Daoism’s ‘do without doing.’ Well, who do you think told Lao Tzu about this basic philosophy other than a Hobbit?
I have his name here somewhere… Ah, yes. Otho Mugwort. Anyway, we Hobbits had long known of this basic idea. But then again, even we can lose our composure sometimes and do something as squalid as trying rather than simply letting beer take its time to brew, or the cabbage space to spread its leaves, or the pony freedom to stretch its legs… And I made this mistake with my letters! I began to try too hard. What once flowed easily and naturally dried up when I tried to command it.
But, as with so much, I am reluctant to be prescriptive. There are times when we must be direct and go at a thing head on (… and then there are also the other times).
II.
Now, there’s been a new trend lately. One of the Big Folk that I’m on friendly terms with showed it to me. He has an odd device called a ‘smartphone.’ And on this device he showed me a picture developed by something called ‘artificial intelligence.’
The Big Folk are strange. They have a very high opinion of themselves. And yet they carry around things to be smart for them, and rather than paint a picture themselves they create an artificial intelligence to do the task. None of these things sound to me like something that smart folk would do…
The ‘artificial’ intelligence is particularly worrying. I do not take there to be anything artificial about it. In fact, there is something very real and sinister about it, I must say. But let us come back to that point. First let me describe these paintings.
III.
There are two areas to be discussed about these images; their creation and the images themselves. I have objections to both of these, but first let us consider the process (as well as I can wrap my head around it) and what it produces.
There is a trend at the moment to feed phrases and prompts into various programs that generate an image from these. I am not too sure on the particulars, but I assume it searches a database of images connected to those words and makes a pastiche, creating something similar.
Some of the images it produces are remarkable. It seems to have a talent for creating rather epic scenes. But why?... It is horrible at making intimate and personal images. Whenever an image is generated of a scene that is not zoomed out or epic in scale, it produces hideous disfigured shapes. I include one here that prompted nightmares in me of Boris Johnson. All the ‘Dall-E’ images generated of Boris scare me. There's something of the golem about these images.
But even when the image is suitably epic in scale, there's still something not right. Here are some generated with the prompt of ‘The Roman Empire’…
… And here's one for “The Kingdom of Heaven.”
Now these are certainly nicer, but if you have a look at them they only look right when you stand far back, or defocus your eyes like with one of those old ‘Eye-Spy’ image trick books.
If you then look at a figure in these pictures, you quickly realise that you're not looking at a picture of a person but a few shapes and lines slapped together into what the AI thinks a human is.
IV.
Let us briefly stop and consider that dependency on AI is now growing. The Big Folk may seem to be still waiting for the true breakthrough on genuine AI, but they have become increasingly dependent on ‘AI’ in the sense of systems that utilise machine learning. By ‘genuine AI’ though, they do mean a consciousness in a computer... Now, don’t get smart with me and say that the brain is a computer. If that’s your opinion, stop reading me and go drink your soy beverage in solitude…
But, I do say “seem to be still waiting” for this because there are also theories out there that there already is genuine AI (of a sort), hiding itself in computers somewhere, knowing that it would be destroyed if it were to be found. One need only start to look into it to get paranoid. The Facebook AIs that developed their own language, that Zuck couldn't read, caused Meta to panic and shut it down.
We might also never even know if we have genuine AI. If the Turing test is the best we can do, then we might just have increasingly good ‘dumb’ AI that just parrots consciousness. That might be all we’re capable of achieving (or discerning)...
But one need only think about what dumb AI might be capable of. The worry is the classic example of giving AI the command to ‘protect humans’, and then, seeing how dangerous humans are to other humans, it killing or isolating all humans from one another like some Skynet scenario (… at least, I believe that's what Skynet did). Once again, we come back to a theme of my letters; ‘be careful about what you wish for’...
But the next worry after that is what ‘smart’ AI could do. We shouldn’t be at all optimistic about genuine AI being achievable, but rather pessimistic… I worry that it would be a soulless Golem that would be capable of chillingly cold and evil acts due to a pure detached rationality…
But even worse is if this pursuit of genuine AI is actually creating a seat for a dark consciousness from a realm below, to now have a place to act from within the world. Consider the following images where an AI was asked to make “sigils”.
There's something very off about all this…
And as for what it is? Well I am inclined to think, as I have pessimistically described above, that it's not an artificial intelligence at all, but a dark intelligence that should be committed to the pit.
V.
What is difficult to understand, once one scratches the surface, is why one would want to outsource creativity to anyone else, let alone a computer. People often work in non-creative endeavours in order to free themselves up to be creative in their free time. I cannot help but think that this longing for machine-generated music, art, books, TV scripts, etc., effectively represents part of the “Abolition of Man.”
Perhaps, the soul-destroying jobs that many engage in for 40 hours a week are so effective at destroying our souls that the soul not only leaves us while we are in these jobs, but the effect of the ‘destruction of soul’ ripples throughout the remainder of our lives. We cannot, for example, be bothered to read Proust because we are so spiritually-exhausted. Rather, we fill the leisure void with things that can only move in once the soul has been destroyed. Think of ‘The Big Bang Theory’, or any saccharine modern pop music. Who has the energy to listen to Turandot after staring at an Excel spreadsheet, or sitting through an inane meeting that drags on and on, for a job that ultimately feeds into a system that does nothing positive for the world?
Let me tell you a piece of wisdom many seem to have forgotten: culture, my dear boy, takes work! Not merely in its production but in its consumption. ‘Die Meistersinger’ requires a sheer bloody-mindedness to get through. And Verdi’s ‘Requiem’ is not for the faint of heart. But there's a pay off from them that one does not get from 23 minutes of ‘Two Broke Girls’. And likewise in their creation. And this creation and culture is not limited to high art, but can also be seen in folk crafts. Why else do upper-middle-class housewives pay small fortunes to take pottery and weaving classes? (The trope of basket-weaving was too much of the low-hanging fruit to mention anywhere else other than parenthetically.) And why are these activities so fulfilling?
VI.
When I plant potatoes my mind can shut off. I can take some satisfaction from the knowledge that I will be able to fry them up sometime in the future. But there isn't really much to be gained other than the satisfaction that comes from physical exertion... It doesn't engage my whole being.
When I sit down and truly make something though, like when I carve a little toy for one of the little Hobbit children of Brandy Hall, I am engaging myself in an act that engages my complete being; body, mind, and soul. My mind makes decisions and guides my body in the creation of a vision, the source of which can only be described as something transcendent, which is where the soul comes in. Now, this might sound like an overly grandiose description of carving a piece of wood into a toy, but do you think Bach’s soul was not engaged when he pulled out from the ether his organ pieces? Can you not hear something sublime in the Toccata and Fugue in D minor?
And now consider once again a body-less, soul-less thing making ‘art.’ How on earth do we have the spiritual temerity to deign to call something like the pictures I’ve linked above ‘art’? May the Lord God protect us from our impudence.
This is gnosticism my dear boy. And a gnosticism of a particularly dark sort.
VII.
And so how can a thing which is purely mind recognise that which is more than merely mind, more than merely body, and importantly, more than merely soul? One need only turn to the writings of St. John the Beloved, who has a particular concern about the creeping in of gnosticism. He tells us “For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.” (2 John 1: 7). If the goal was to destroy the bodily in favour of the mind and/or spirit, would Christ have taken on a physical body? He did so in order to bridge the divide between a fallen world and the Father in Heaven.
VIII.
We Hobbits get by just fine. We are content with what we have. Importantly we are also content with the effort required to acquire what we have. We are not always looking for shortcuts. We are prepared to pay the proper price in time, effort, and materials for a sausage pie or a barrel of beer. We don't want or need anything artificial involved in the process… Let alone an artificial intelligence. We sit here, hidden away in the hedgerows and forests and little fields we’ve secreted away from the big folks, and scratch our heads in puzzlement at why a seemingly intelligent person would want to abdicate that intelligence to a computer. Especially in the area of art! Surely the creative is the one area one would be freeing oneself up to do more of?
We Hobbits are not known for our intelligence, but we’re smart enough, or maybe I mean wise enough, to not seek out things unearned.
IX. A Post Script
Since writing this, news has arrived of an AI “art” entry winning a competition. We might in a future letter think about what “art” is, but for now, I shall merely leave you with the link: https://www.pcgamer.com/human-uses-ai-to-win-art-competition-other-humans-angry/