More AI Nonsense (An exercise for Through the Looking Glass)

Art & Tech
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Thanks for contributing your thoughts, John! There are so, so many more problems with these articles.

It’s so hard even to navigate these issues with diverse audiences as widespread colloquial term usages open the door for a host of fallacies. Take, for example, the term “create”:

Now, if we look to your average dictionary, we might find a collection of common usages like:

1: to cause. Occasion.
2: to bring into existence.
3: to produce through imaginative skill

When we are talking about artistic endeavors or most aspects of the art experience, it seems obvious which usage we would likely be using. So as you can imagine, it’s irritating when I see headlines like:

“Will Art Created By Artificial Intelligence Kill The Artist?” (FStoppers, Aug. 17th, 2022)

This is a rather common variation of an equivocation fallacy fueling clickbait. Equivocation is a logical fallacy in which a term with multiple meanings is used in an ambiguous or deliberately misleading way. To explore this–, I have a small exercise that I plan to present to my audience next month:

Let’s navigate this problem:

When a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around, does it create a sound?
Well, no, a sound requires an agent that can transduce energy into a perception.

Ok, then–how about this:
When a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around, does it create a pressure wave?

What do you mean by create? As these two questions are not the same:

  1. When a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around, does it produce, through imaginative skill, a pressure wave?
  2. When a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around, does it cause a pressure wave?

The answers would differ depending on the usage of create:

  1. No. There is, at present, no evidence that trees can possess or demonstrate imaginative skills, so the reasonable answer is no.
  2. Yes. There is, at present, a mountain of evidence that a tree falling in the forest will cause a disturbance that will produce a vibration in the air (pressure wave.)

The clickbait article headline uses “create” in the context of art so that readers will likely infer that AI Art Generators hold some capacity for imaginative skills and intent-driven agency. The fallacy is hilariously transparent. It’s like when people argue against evolution, saying it’s just a theory. It’s blatant equivocation.

It would take days or even weeks to go through all of the actual problems with articles like the one I partially reviewed. Hopefully, I can get people to become more familiar with additional tools to navigate topics like this. :smile:

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