"...the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare" - some thoughts from a non-professional on AI, AI poetry, and how we respond to the Machine devouring the humanities

 Full disclosure: I am not an expert on anything, let alone AI and its development, and specifically its development in the production of “art”. Better Substackers than I have written intelligently on this and I recommend their articles as worth reading and considering. As for me, my amateur tag is slapped on my forehead. I am writing this just after making pancakes for my family and before I have take kids to various locals and then buckle down and get my notes together for the three literature classes which I teach at our homeschooling co-op. Dishes and laundry also await. No degrees hang on my wall or lie hidden away. But because I value art and literature and because I see its devaluation beginning to creep into the homeschooling world, I wanted to get some thoughts down on what is not only the problem but how those of us who are involved in education - whether institutional or autodidactic - can respond.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Peter Bruegel the Elder

There is the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare. Unlike art which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, [machinery] attempts to actualize desire, and so to create power in this World; and that cannot really be done with any real satisfaction. Labour-saving machinery only creates endless and worse labour. And in addition to this fundamental disability of a creature, is added the Fall, which makes our devices not only fail of their desire but turn to new and horrible evil. So we come inevitably from Daedalus and Icarus to the Giant Bomber. It is not an advance in wisdom! This terrible truth, glimpsed long ago by Sam Butler, sticks out so plainly and s so horrifyingly exhibited in our time, with its even worse menace for the future, that it seems a world wide mental disease that only a tiny minority perceive it. Even if people have ever heard the legends (which is getting rarer) they have no inkling of their portent. How could a maker of motorbikes name his product Ixion cycles! Ixion, who was bound for ever in hell on a perpetually revolving wheel!

Tolkien, letter 75

Robert Charboneau and Henry Oliver both wrote articles on Substack this week in response to a recent podcast. The topic was AI and as part of the larger discussion discussion, the host and his guest talked briefly “On AI’s future understanding of intangibles” - so titled in the episode transcription. Both Mr. Charboneau’s and Mr. Oliver’s articles are helpful for thoughtfully considering what is only going to become more and more a part of our culture - AI’s involvement in “the intangibles” of our society. For example, this video from 5 months ago (which cites an essay by the AI expert on the Conversations with Tyler podcast that sparked this whole thing - Sam Altman’s essay, “The Intelligence Age”). And this from two years ago. And this which I hope is some kind of elaborate prank - it says about its artists that, “They use generative AI as a tool, a collaborator, or a muse to yield creative output that could not have been dreamed of by either entity alone.” AI as a muse. God, help us.

Cultivating or Conditioning?

Leaving aside what I consider at best an equivocating term for Art and Literature (“intanglibles” - what is that? In a society obsessed with tangibility, such a term could lead one to subconsciously justify an unrecognized assumption that these are mere optional ornamentations instead of those things that makes life worth living - but I am leaving it aside…), the discussion of whether or not AI would write “a poem as good as the median Pablo Neruda poem, but not the best” is one we ought to pay attention to. What we consume conditions us. We are cultivated by the media we take in and enjoy. Our taste is trained by the foods we regularly eat. Or as Blake said, “We become what we behold.” Considering the near omni-presence of AI in our society, we ought to be thinking - seriously thinking - about the possible consequences to our tastes of beholding images and language produced by an artificial intelligence.… 

Here is the quote from the transcript:

COWEN: … In my view there’s a big gap between a Neruda poem that’s a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10 and one that’s a 10. I think you’ll reach the 8.8 within a few years.

ALTMAN: I think we will reach the 10 and you won’t care. 

COWEN: Who won’t care?

ALTMAN: You won’t care.

COWEN: I’ll care. I promise.

ALTMAN: You’ll care in terms of the technological accomplishment, but in terms of the great pieces of art and emotion and whatever else produced by humanity, you care a lot about the person or that a person produced it. It’s definitely something for an AI to write a 10 on its technical merits.

My classic example of this is, the greatest chess players don’t really care that AI is hugely better than them at chess. It doesn’t demotivate them to play. They don’t really care that they are. They really care about beating the other human, and they really get obsessed with that dude sitting across from them. The fact that the AI is better, they don’t care. Watching two AIs play each other, not that fun for that long.

COWEN: Let me tell you my worry about reaching the 10. Evaluations rely a lot on these rubrics. The rubrics will become good enough to produce very good poems, but maybe there’s something about the 10 poem that stands outside the rubric. If you’re just training on rubrics, rubrics, rubrics, it might in a way be counterproductive for reaching the 10.

ALTMAN: Evals can rely on a lot of things, including when you call upon the 10 and when you don’t.

COWEN: Sure.

ALTMAN: You can read a bunch in the process and provide some real-time signal.

COWEN: Say we have no human poets today writing 10s, and we’re asking those same people to judge and grade the GPTs. I’m worried. Again, I think it will be fine. To me, we’re talking about a 9, not a 10. You don’t have William Wordsworth working for OpenAI.

ALTMAN: This gets to a very interesting thing, which is, let’s say you can’t write a 10, but you can decide when something is a 10. That might be all that we need.

COWEN: Maybe humanity only decides collectively what’s a 10, and there’s something a little mysterious and history-laden about that process.

ALTMAN: Okay, but still, we can do it. Now, maybe our decision is not very good because it is history-related and it does drift over time, and some things we all agree are great, the next generation decides they’re not, whatever, but if whatever process humanity has to determine what poem is a 10, you could imagine that providing some sort of signal to an AI. Now that, again, if you know it’s an AI, maybe you don’t care. We see this phenomenon with AI art, but yes.

Again, both Mr. Charboneau and Mr. Oliver engage with this portion of the podcast on a level of expertise that I lack. I commend their articles to you. My main issue with all of this is the presupposition underneath. Who is determining the Scale of Value? How - how?? - will anyone be able to judge poetry of any kind if they have not been educated on poetry, or studied it as an object of study? If all we have is modern verse which places self-expression alongside formal creative arts and treats works of self-expression as at least, if not equally, as valid and beautiful as (and perhaps even superior to) the works we refer to as “masterpieces,” how will we have any solid basis from which to judge inherent quality? Value judgement of anything requires a base level of knowledge of technique and scope. As I read in A Preface to Paradise Lost yesterday, “…the learning which a reader requires in responding to a given allusion does not equal the learning Milton needed to find it.” (p.45) Milton needed more learning in order to produce Paradise Lost, but the reader must have a measure of learning in order to properly read and understand it. 

The Cultivated Amateur

This aquired knowledge base that is necessary in order to enjoy and engage with the arts is why I started this Substack and why I titled it, “The Cultivated Amateur”. I did not mean it as any kind of praise to myself or some sort of pretentious declaration of superiority. The phrase comes from an essay by Northrop Frye called “The Instruments of Mental Production,” available in The Stubborn Structure:

"Because we have tended to think of leisure as occasional or preparatory, and leisure-time activities as merely filling up the cracks of a busy life, the creative arts, which are particularly the symbols of cultivation, have never reached their true educational proportions. I think that what is true of scholarship is also true of the creative arts: those who paint and write and compose are, again, producers. The process of liberal education seems to me to be concerned more with understanding and responding to the arts than with producing them, though of course, this is a matter of emphasis, not of definition. As Castiglione showed for the Renaissance courtier, the artist needs to be complemented by the cultivated amateur, who represents the social vision of an educated public that has some idea what to do with the artist’s work. Hence education in the arts is primarily critical: it struggles to attain a conscious knowledge and understanding of a kind that is normally detached from the creative process itself, though it should be as useful to the creative artist as to anyone else. The chief deficiency in today’s literature, for example, is not the lack of good writer, but the lack of a reading public sufficiently large, informed, and articulate to establish the real social importance of the good writer."

He goes on to say, “The importance of the creative arts becomes obvious in proportion as social leisure increases: they are the primary elements of the cultivated life and of all social ideals.” 

The cultivated amateur is essential to the continuation of the arts and humanities. ESSENTIAL. I do not believe this to be an over-statement. Scholars and experts are essential as well, but the educated public is equal to them. The cultivated person is a living gallery of art and humanities. 

To quote Lewis again, "…a notion that has become increasingly prevalent for about a hundred years [is] the notion that poets are the only judges of poetry. … Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed. … The idea of a poetry which exists only for the poet - a poetry which the public rather overhears than hears - is a foolish novelty in criticism. There is nothing specially admirable in talking to oneself."

"Only the skilled can judge the skillfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result. It is for cooks to say whether a given dish proves skill in the cook; but whether the product on which this skill has been lavished is worth eating or no is a question on which a cook’s opinion is of no particular value."

This is where a trained, cultivated taste comes in. If a man prefers a well-prepared osso buco to a frozen pizza, he is proving the quality of his palate and his culinary education was a success. He does not have to know how to prepare osso boco in order to enjoy it, but if he has spent his life eating Red Baron, osso boco could be tediously disgusting and drive him back to his frozen pizza, or it could come as a revelation and the beginning of new gastronomical wonders. 

"We may therefore allow poets to tell us (at least is they are experienced in the same kind of composition) whether it is easy or difficult to write like Milton, but not whether the reading of Milton is a valuable experience.

"… A school boy who reads a page of Milton by chance, for the first time, and then looks up and says, ‘By gum!’ not in the least knowing how the things has worked, but only that new strength and width and brightness and zest have transformed his world, is nearer to the truth than they."

All that to say, our intentional cultivation of our own minds and artistic tastes is essential, and it is eroded or built up by that which we regularly consume. 

Closer consideration of Frye’s quote

Frye’s quote deserves close and considered attention, especially in light of the Conversations with Tyler podcast’s all-too-brief conversation about the future of the “intangibles” - those distinctly human expressions - and all the assumptions behind and implications of such statements as “…if whatever process humanity has to determine what poem is a 10, you could imagine that providing some sort of signal to an AI.” To listen to their conversation, one would think that art comes down not to enjoyment of it but judgement of it. And yes, you could probably train AI to “determine what poem is a 10.” But is that the point? No, it is absolutely not. 

Here are some of the thoughts that come to my mind after reading Frye and that I think are helpful in providing structure to our long-term consideration of AI and Art:

• it all starts with a view - an assumption - of the arts as optional or ornamental, things to fill the cracks of an otherwise busy life. Those of us who feel physical nausea at the idea of AI poetry and art not only being produced at all but being judged alongside the likes of Wordsworth and not only received by perhaps preferred, for example, approach art and poetry from a fundamentally different direction. It is not optional. It is not so much spackle or plaster to the facade of life. It is life:

"Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions. It relates to whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind. It comes home to the bosoms and businesses of men; for nothing but what so comes home to them in the most general and intelligible shape, can be a subject for poetry. Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else. It is not a mere frivolous accomplishment (as some persons have been led to imagine), the trifling amusement of a few idle readers or leisure hours -- it has been the study and delight of mankind in all ages. Many people suppose that poetry is something to be found only in books, contained in lines of ten syllables, with like endings: but wherever there is a sense of beauty, or power, or harmony, as in the motion of a wave of the sea, in the growth of a flower that ‘spreads its sweet leaves to the air, and dedicates its beauty to the sun’, -- there is poetry, in its birth. If history is a grave study, poetry may be said to be a graver: its materials lie deeper, and are spread wider. History treats, for the most part, of the cumbrous and unwieldy masses of things, the empty cases in which the affairs of the world are packed, under the heads of intrigue or war, in different states, and from century to century: but there is no thought or feeling that can have entered into the mind of man, which he would be eager to communicate to others, or which they would listen to with delight, that is not a fit subject for poetry. It is not a branch of authorship: it is ‘the stuff of which our life is made’. The rest is ‘mere oblivion’, a dead letter: for all that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it. Fear is poetry, hope is poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy, remorse, admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all poetry. Poetry is that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies, refines, raises our whole being: without it ‘man’s life is poor as beast’s’. Man is a poetical animal: and those of us who do not study the principles of poetry, act upon them all our lives, like Moliere’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who had always spoken prose without knowing it." (On Poetry in General by William Hazlitt)

• if Frye is right and the creative arts are “the symbols of the cultivated life,” what does it say about us and our cultivation that we are at least indifferent to AI’s involvement in the process, at most excited about it and promoting it? Cultivation is at root a gardening term. It is, according to Merrium-Webster, “the act or art of cultivating or tilling.” Cultivating is “1. to prepare or prepare and use for the raising of crops, to loosen or break up the soil about 2. to foster the growth of, culture, to improve by labor, car, or study: refine 3. futher, encourage 4. to seek the society of: make friends with. Think about what we sign over to AI in giving it collaborator status, or thinking of it as a muse. My entire insides revolt at the thought. It is disgusting.

• the purpose of education should be to educate a public not only in the science by in the arts. Society itself is a work of collective vision. We are aiming for not what is there but what we want to see. Northrop Frye says this over and over in multiple essays. Instruments is no exception:

"Education is concerned with two worlds: the world that man lives in and the world he wants to live in. It would, of course, be nonsense to say that the former was the business of the sciences and the latter the business of the humanities and the arts. But it is true that science is primarily the study of the order of nature, the world that is there: it is true also that the form of the world man wants to live in is revealed by the form of the world he keeps trying to build, the world of cities and gardens and libraries and highways that is a world of art. We come closer to their relation if we say that the two great divisions of liberal knowledge embody two moral attitudes which are also intellectual virtues. The distinctive intellectual virtue of science is detachment, the objective consideration of evidence, the drawing of rational conclusions from evidence, the rejection of all devices for cooking or manipulating the evidence. …

"But in the arts, particularly the literary arts, we become aware of many human factors relevant to them but not to science as such: emotion, value, aesthetic standards, the portrayal of objects of desire and hope and dream as realities, the explicit preference of life to death, of growth to petrification of freedom to enslavement. Literature is not detached but concerned: it deals with what is there in terms of what man wants and doesn’t want."

or this more succinctly from The Educated Imagination:

"Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination. But we use our imagination all the time: it comes into all our conversation and practical life: it even produces dreams when we’re asleep. Consequently we have only the choice between a badly trained imagination and a well-trained one, whether we ever read a poem or not."

Consider the implications of this regarding AI participating in the creative arts. Will artsy AI be forced on us with the same intensity and insistence that it is now forced on us in nearly every online venue? If so, to whom are we handing the reins of our training over? The machine? And from what is the machine drawing its materials? Is it drawing from the best of us or just every color on the palette? Who is feeding the machine the standards of judgement if it is pulling from the “Best of” pool - who is deciding what is best? Our current standards for what is considered “the best” of humanity’s creative arts ranges from either “classics” - those triumphs of technique and imagination that have stood the test of time - to modern - typically, demonstrations of flagrant unrestrained originality to the point of imbecility (guess which standard I prefer). But for both standards, it is informed humans deciding, informed humans exercising their intelligence and training to place value on pieces created by fellow humans. There will always be humans behind AI - but who will they be and who will be educating their imaginations? They will be the ones shaping ours.

"The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then , is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in. …"

He goes on to say,

"If a society changes very rapidly, and our society certainly does, we have to recognize the large element of illusion in all social mythology as a simple matter of self-protection. The first thing our imaginations have to do for us, as soon as we can handle words well enough to read and write and talk, is to fight to protect us from falling into the illusions that society threatens us with. The illusion is itself produced by the social imagination, of course, but it’s an inverted form of imagination. What it creates is the imaginary, which as I said earlier is different from the imaginative."

The age of AI is an age of illusion. We can watch videos that are so realistic it is difficult to tell the difference between actual events in the tangible past and those which are visual tricks. How are we going to meet this if we are in the process of signing our imaginative training over to the makers of the illusions?

“The chief deficiency in today’s literature, for example, is not the lack of good writer, but the lack of a reading public sufficiently large, informed, and articulate to establish the real social importance of the good writer.” Written in 1967. How much more true is this today? We do not value education in the arts because we do not see them as essential because what is essential is what is useful and of what use are the creative arts to the average person. Aside from cultivating his humanity and allowing him to participate in the social vision of his culture - no value. Because we do not value the arts as we do physical exercise or multiplication tables, they are treated as marginal and students having any kind of literary or artistic intelligence is treated as optional at best, distracting at worst. In this kind of environment, will it even matter if AI takes over what we still call “the humanities”? I noticed that in the podcast transcript, “intangibles” replaced “humanities.” Possibly this was unintentional, but consider - can we call the cultivating, creative arts our own if we hand them over so willing to our machines? We forfeit the right to name them as “the humanities” if machines produce them on our behalf.

“What will be lost, and what saved, of our civilization probably lies beyond our powers to decide. No human group has ever figured out how to design its future. Thomas Cahill

The Intentionally Cultivated Amateur

So what in the world do we do now?

Honestly, this is all depressing to me. These arts which are touchstones of the transcendent should not be so cheerfully, so quickly handed over to machinery and processors. I suspect there will be a remnant of people who choose to keep these things alive in these dark ages of artificial light, something like the Irish monks in their tiny stone huts, copying the great works of western civilization after Rome fell: “Like the Jews before them, the Irish enshrined literacy as their central religious act.” I think some of us understand why they did and will follow, in some small way, in their footsteps.

But what? What can we do that will guard our own minds against this tidal wave of mass produced “art”? At the risk of my Charlotte Mason showing, here is what I’m doing - imperfectly, but still attempting to do - and what I recommend for you as much as for your children. These are anchors to reality as well as points of contact with other humans in other times and places. It is giving ourselves regular doses of the best of humanity’s creative acts - humanity’s Humanities. 

Read books

Preferably lots of old books. The language of old books is an education in itself. There are modern authors who value language and whose prose has a poetic quality - Wendell Berry comes to mind; Tolkien and Lewis; I’m sure there are others. Susanna Clark maybe? Seek them out. We learn that language was not only made for memos and emails but to evoke in the soul experiences that go beyond our everyday speech. Transcendence through language written by a fellow human and not a machine.

Memorize poetry

Hiding not only scripture in your heart but the best poetry in your mother tongue cultivates your inner landscape. It tames our wilderness within and makes of it a garden. Memorize those poems you love to read and come back to again and again. Limericks count, but shouldn’t make up the entirety of your cache. Recite them regularly. They atrophy and evaporate with lack of use.

Write poetry

Nothing will give you an appreciation for the complexity of the sonnet like trying to write one. Making is a valuable way to increase our appreciation and admiration of those things worthy of appreciation and admiration

Listen to beautiful music - pretty self-explanatory

Art Study

In our homeschool when the kids were younger we spent a lot more time on this than we do now. What is Art? How do we know something is Art? Transcendent things defy easy definitions. Art is

• that which commands a specific medium with trained skill or mastery
• a piece that contains a larger narrative or story (a sculpture tells a story) and is not merely “a comment on” something in society
• that which is able to pull you out of yourself and your current time and place; that which broadens and expands your awareness of life, eternity, love, death, others, etc.; the quality of transcendence

Not every piece of Art does all of these things for every person, but a work of Art should have the potential for transcendence. Whether through enormous canvases of majestic landscapes or a portrayal of the microscopic to help you see the infinity that lies in tiny detail. And not just painting. Sculpture, music, dance - even the domestic arts; I have seen some artistic quilts that stopped me dead in my tracks. The point is the latent ability of True Art to transcend the daily cycle of living life that matters. Honestly, I believe that for every living human soul there is a work of Art in existence that could, if the two should ever meet, cause a moment of transcendent sight for the viewer.  

As an aside, “art” that consists of splattered paint or a browning banana duct-taped to a wall is only transcendent only to those whose stock responses have been so conditioned as to see it as “a brilliant comment on the art market.” Lewis has a great section on this in A Preface to Paradise Lost. Art study helps us and our kids develop the correct (and yes, there are correct) stock responses.

Nature Study

“Touch grass.” Get outside. As of yet, Man is still the primary sub-modifier of matter, though people are probably looking for ways to farm this out as well. Patrick Webb is worth reading on the architectural/craftsman side of this. Spend time enjoying the natural world. 

Pay attention to the interaction of Art with Art

This is sort of tangential, but as I was writing I was thinking about how Art is humanity's conversation with itself - or maybe "inner dialogue" is a better term. It is our past speaking to our present, leaving notes for our future, and we respond by taking it in and appreciating it. Some artists take up what was said and add to it or play on it or respond to it. I’m thinking of works like Ralph Vaughan William’s Fantasia on a Theme from Thomas Tallis, or Dvorjak’s compositions rooted in folk music or Auden’s Musee de Beaux Arts - or anything ekphrastic at all. This is the body of humanity discussing, exploring, engaging with what it means to be humanity, to be a human member of humanity. Art is membership, to put it in Wendell Berry-ish terms. It is born in a culture, in a context of flesh and blood. It is our inheritance, our birth-right, and we are trading it for a bowl of lentil soup.

Really, all we can do is what we can do, however small. Part of me wants to weep in a corner and buy up all the poetry books I can find as a way of flipping off a society that has cheapened speech, and especially the language of the human soul, to the point of making it a clever party trick performed by a mechanical parrot. But what good will that do? In a brief video on grief, John Piper said, “Occasionally, weep deeply over the life that you hoped would be. Grieve the losses. Feel the pain. Then wash your face, trust God, and embrace the life that he’s given you.” This applies as much to cultural loss as it does to personal. We are watching our culture decay. If you’re not convinced of this, bully for you. I am. We are losing more than we will ever gain back. So what do we do? Weep, mourn, then try to do what we can to preserve and make what we can. Our hope is not in these things lasting but in what they point us to. Art is a vehicle of transcendence because there is a Reality beyond all the whir and hum of wheels and processors, and that reality will continue long after the last AI server is unplugged and ice cold. Thank God.

“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule”

The Return of the King