Puppetry or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Art Made By AI
This essay was adapted from a talk developed while in residence at TED (watch).
At the first-ever film screening in the 1890’s, a few seconds of grainy, black-and-white footage of an oncoming locomotive proved to be so shocking to the audience they fell out of their seats in fear. The story is an urban legend about the 1895 film Arrival Of A Train by the Lumière Brothers. As a founding myth of cinema, it captures the dismay and panic that moving pictures initially inspired, at a time when people were still getting used to the concept of a photograph.
In the digital age, the newest medium to come barreling toward us at full speed is AI, or artificial intelligence, and we are no less terrified.
The popular narrative around AI is that computers will reach an inevitable state of complexity and eventually become superintelligent. Any day now, they might surpass us in intelligence, become self-aware, and develop feelings and intentions of their own. When they finally enslave and/or kill all of humankind, we should not be entirely surprised.
We prize our human intelligence so very much — we believe intelligence is what separates us from the animals. But even if our monopoly on smarts seems to shrink with each new leap in computing power, machines can never be…
