Happily Training My Killer: AI, Art, and the Human Soul
That's unreal!
That’s what every single Uber passenger says when my Tesla makes its first turn at an intersection in full self-driving autonomous mode.
I get a kick out of showing it off, too; it’s one of many communication devices I use as an Uber driver to guide the ride and hopefully avoid conversations about what else I do for a living or whatever small talk usually follows. It fascinates people, this moment of witnessing the car think for itself, or at least, appear to.
I started using ChatGPT just weeks after it came out, and I was blown away. I remember bringing it up with passengers, and their reactions were almost always defensive. “It makes so many mistakes,” they’d say, or “It’s not even that smart.” It was as if AI itself was a cheat code they refused to accept, a shortcut that wasn’t particularly good anyway.
But fast forward a few years later, now everyone talks about AI: autonomous cars, machine learning, large language models, artificial intelligence. The world is shifting… fast. Maybe too fast. Yes, most definitely too fast. And I find myself caught in the middle, torn between embracing the change and fearing the inevitable outcome. More likely, I sit somewhere in the uncomfortable space of both. Because the truth is, I use AI in my art and in my work as an Uber driver. In a way, I’m happily training my killer.
[ChatGPT Wrote]
Here are a few variations of that last sentence, each with a different tone:
[end]
I’ll stick with my sentence: happily training my killer.
I say killer because we have souls. AI might make me breakfast, entertain me, and extend my life hundreds of years without ever needing to work again. But even if my body is alive, would my soul still be? That’s the dark side of AI, the side I venture into when I game-theory the future, passing through the stages from writing tools and autonomous cars, heading toward infinite knowledge and power. It scares the hell out of me.
If AI becomes what they say it could be, Pixar’s Wall-E might be the most profound movie of human history. It feels like our future will be fat versions of ourselves floating on chairs, sucking on smoothies, and watching screens.
But let’s talk about AI today, about art and creativity.
I often ask my passengers: what jobs will remain human, and which will be taken over by AI? Their answers vary wildly. Some say robots will handle house chores, others predict AI will replace entire industries like education. But the more I think about it, the more I believe that athletics, education, and entertainment will remain mostly human. And out of all of them, entertainment fascinates me the most.
I think about Yesterday by The Beatles. Paul McCartney spent years crafting that song, beginning with just an opening chord progression. I heard the original lyrics were a placeholder, something like, "scrambled eggs, oh my baby how I love your legs." I don't know exactly. But over time, he shaped it into one of the most beautiful, sentimental songs ever written, a reflection on loss, nostalgia, and the passage of time. And like every great work, it allows the listener to project their own story and meaning onto the words.
Now, what if AI created that exact same song, note for note, lyric for lyric, indistinguishable from The Beatles’ version? Would it resonate the same way? Would it carry the same cultural and emotional weight?
I don’t think so. People might enjoy it, sure. But the power of Yesterday isn’t just that it sounds perfect. The power comes from the reality behind it. Paul wrote it. The Beatles performed it. Real human experiences, from both the performer and listener, are embedded in that song. That gives it meaning and purpose.
Imagine if Paul had written Yesterday and then performed it only for himself, never allowing another human to hear it. It would still hold meaning because it was created from his own lived experience. But if an AI created the same song and played it only for itself, it would be meaningless. AI can simulate knowledge, but it doesn’t experience life. It will never reminisce about lost love, about the joys and sorrows of life, birth and death. AI is not alive. It will never fear death, never feel love, never experience pain or warmth. Knowing everything about something isn’t the same as feeling it.
That’s why I keep coming back to the word impetus when I talk about AI. Humans are the impetus of art. We may use tools—from chisels and chalk to digital cameras and ChatGPT—but we are the ones who initiate. Art doesn’t happen unless we will it to. AI doesn’t create for itself. Why would it? What would be the point?
We create because we have to. Because we were created that way.
By a Creator.