Artificial Intelligence, Corporations and the Human Soul
Why Do We Perceive Art by Corporations and AI as Soulless?
We often talk about the products, art and services of AI and corporations to be soulless. Especially in recent years, where AI adoption has been at the forefront of the commercial gates of hell, and an overabundance of artificially made artwork, literature and video has been inflating the market. In terms of soullessness, corporations have always verged on the impersonal. They are large entities made up of several people, not creative works spearheaded by passionate individuals. Despite this, they’ve always had a somewhat human touch, despite mass production and industrialisation. The illustrations on soda cans have been conjured up by individuals who have infused some of their personality with it, and even Corporate Memphis, as a style, was thought up and created by individuals who left a unique soul fingerprint.
In our times, AI and even corporations have become synonymous with soulless, mass-produced art - whether it’s pop music, tacky illustrations or copy-and-paste blockbuster movies, in all aspects of human culture, there is now more than ever an influx of so-called soulless work. What does that mean, though? Soulless? That’s what we’re going to be delving deeper into in this blog post.
The human soul is a difficult thing to describe; the word itself comes from Old English and is cognate with most other Germanic languages, describing the spiritual or immaterial essence of a person. The Latin word for soul is anima, and it has two meanings: soul, but also breath. It’s the root for the modern English words: animation or animate. Meaning imparting or giving life. In the case of the visual arts, giving life or movement to pictures. For art to have soul means it has been infused or given life by the artist from their own essence. More tangibly, it means it has been shaped by the actions of a human being.
The artwork is filled with human error; it’s created from an amalgamation of experience, knowledge and creativity. The thing that sets it apart from AI and corporations (which both create from knowledge and perhaps experience) is the personal aspect. Corporations and AI often try to mimic this personal aspect, but neither of them is personal, because neither are people. Corporations are made up of a lot of different people, as much as they try to appear as cults of personality, at the end of the day, they are groups of people, forming a larger culture; they are not an individual in that culture. A group of people have many souls, and a larger collective work is infused a little bit by each person, and so it becomes this unreal and schizophrenic kind of personality. Multiple wills and ideas conflicting and contradicting each other to appear like a single soul.
People coming together can create wonderful things, and in many ways, it’s one of our greatest traits as humans. Artistically, however, it often makes for art which is so polished and conceptually perfect that it seems unnatural. Human individuals aren’t perfect; they’re a blend of good and bad, mixed in with a whole lot of paradox. Art as such is a unique expression of their greatest moments and their shortcomings; shortcomings which both AI and corporations cleverly hide, and in doing so, they appear soulless.
Connection - Art as a Living Language
The human soul is an individual droplet, and they’re all from the same waters, yet still unique and different from their sameness, and in this digital age, the presentation of most art is the same. You reading this are not talking or even listening to me as an individual; this text really isn't any different from any other text on the internet, other than its message and the ability to be imbued by a projection of my being - my soul. The reason AI and corporations don't have souls is that while they may use the same medium, they are not individuals capable of infusing their art or work with something personal to them. As much as government and legislators want to treat both of these entities as people and individuals, they are not, and never will be. They are more akin to freakish abominations of a collective human consciousness, a sort of mutant mind machine, trying to puzzle together pieces of human intelligence and soul. These Frankensteinian monstrosities do not and can never have a soul because of their nature. They can try their best to mimic, imitate and try and convince you that they have a soul or that their work and art are no different from that of individual human beings. They can never and will never be able to infuse their work with that personal touch which an artist imprints by infusing their work with the essence of their soul.
You never directly experience a connection with the soul of the individual through their work, but a part of it is left, like an ethereal footprint which can touch your heart. It is this invisible connection between people that makes art a communication capable of transcending all physical and even mental limitations, and it is what makes art soulful. This is true for all art. It’s a difficult process to describe, but anyone who has been touched by art knows the power it has. Art is expressive, and in many ways, like human language, we experience this communication mostly emotionally, but also spiritually and intellectually. Art, in that way, is oftentimes a spontaneous conversation; it’s not a monologue prepared by a board of people deciding on the perfect thing to say. A lot of really great art is unfiltered by societal standards and norms and indulges in the depths of a person’s being. It’s a part of people we don’t see regularly. It’s deeply intimate, revealing secrets and profound truths about the individual that they may be unable to share with others, and in doing so, can also reveal something about our own being.
Each person speaks a language, perhaps with a dialect, and their vocabulary is made up of information they’ve gathered throughout life. But beyond that, they have a unique mannerism, tonation and body language which shapes how we listen to and relate to them. Their mannerisms are part unique but also borrowed from people they’ve known and loved; we have inside jokes with our friends, and the slang we use shapes our communication. It’s a special blend of things coming together that creates a personality. It’s part inherent to the individual and their singularity, but also part of a larger plurality of interactions and periods of their life that shape them. AI and corporations are seeming singularities made up entirely of pluralities, and in some ways, they’re similar to people in that sense.
The sense of scale is completely different, however, and this is what makes that singularity so alien and foreign. It makes up a plurality of many lifetimes of experience, individuality and knowledge which accumulates into an artificial entity, unlike any one human in existence. A great example of genuineness is an apology.
Apologising is a showcase of a plethora of complex human emotions and expressions. It entails compassion, sympathy, regret and possibly guilt. Remorse may be easy to feign, and a genuine apology may be far and in between, but it’s a great way to see the way the soul works and the potential of art. Because for an apology to be effective, it has to be imbued with human emotion, with the soul, if you will, and the same is true for art. All the little components that go into conveying so many complex emotions can be used to express many other things, but the core idea of explicitly reflecting on and then expressing those difficult feelings reveals a lot about the very art of human expression.
On the other hand, we have the obvious soulless and performative excuses from both corporations and AI. They mimic the words, and they make a mockery out of themselves and the person they’re apologising to. There’s no emotion behind the words because there’s no individual. No personal loss or stake, it’s completely devoid of any human nuance. It may be the perfect written apology to express how the corporation is now moving forward in a direction they believe their customers to be more favourable towards, or it may be an AI “owning up” for a mistake. They’re in most instances, if not all, completely flat and only serve to keep up a good public face. Because the board members do not have a personal stake, the “mistake” the company is apologising for might not even have been committed by them; they might have allowed for it to happen, but ultimately they’re distanced from it and play no personal role in it. AI simply lack any self-reflection of that degree and can only discern right from wrong depending on its algorithms and what it’s being fed.
Believability - Imperfect Perfection
To some degree, the human soul has to do with believability. Firstly, if you believe in the concept of a human essence bound to us through metaphysics rather than biology, and then secondly, if the work and motions of it convey to you something which you find believable. If you trust in its words, and if you believe what it’s in front of you to be true. To make art, any art believable, just like an apology, it has to be imbued with several things. Including emotion, reason and simply human connection. What makes the work, art and services of corporations and AI unbelievable or unrelatable to us is that they’re often missing the emotional aspect, and oftentimes the human connection as well. But human connection is a tricky thing, and no science or philosophy has a short answer to it. We bond with other people, but we also get attached to material and immaterial things.
The digital medium can never completely convey the fullness of blood and bone, and its communication is always masked to some extent. The personalities and creators you see online are not fully human. They're actors, all of them, but that doesn't mean that their work is without soul. An actor uses their soul to go into the role completely, and they leave their personal mark on the character they play, but are they truly themselves? Of course not. So believable doesn’t have to be “authentic” in one way, but absolutely has to be in another. For us to suspend our disbelief in art, we have to believe in it, and we have to believe that the artist also believes in it. In some way, we have to not only speak the same language, but we have to have the capacity for understanding the nuances of the individual. One of those nuances is quirks and mistakes - things corporations and AI both carefully try to hide and reprimand.
The gloss of perfection is all over the work of the soulless, as if it’s incapable of recognising itself as anything but flawless. The personalities of these entities are psychopathic, and the schism between the wills of so many different individuals makes them incoherent and inhuman. They’re not relatable as individuals because their personality hides so many things that would make up a great plurality of people. The shiny perfection makes up a deliberation of vastness, inconceivable to a normal person, and it becomes unnatural because of it. It’s human, too human. Humans are not both beast and man, both a natural being existing in the natural world, but also a consciousness possessing some quality of otherness, something distinct from the natural, and losing that anchoring to the real world, makes humans too intellectual, and when a piece of art is only conceived from the aspect of the mental, it becomes unrecognisable and alien. Pure intelligence is artificial, and as there is no aspect of artificial emotionality or artificial soul, the work produced by AI remains inhuman and soulless.
Personally, I don’t think machines or corporations are capable of ever possessing or recreating what makes up the soul. If we remember the Latin word anima, meaning both spirit and breath. We can understand the soul as the thing which animates us. How often do you think about your breathing? How often do you reflect on the will of your soul and what you do? Probably about as often as you focus on your breathing. Which means it might happen, especially if you’re stressed. No, the soul is such a natural part of us that we take it for granted. If breath were just wind, then we could recreate the soul, but then anything touched by it would be animated and alive, which it’s not. Our breathing gives us life, but more than that, it animates us and allows us to move, physically and mentally. It gives rise to consciousness and perception; the soul is the very foundation of existence, of being.
The soul can’t be 3D-printed, and it can’t be solved through complex algorithms; it remains a mystery, and its work happens as naturally as breathing. When you breathe life into an artwork, a small piece of your soul isn’t lost, but there is an ethereal fingerprint left in your work. Something that makes it uniquely you. Perhaps you can’t see, perhaps others can, either, but it is there, and while your work may be perfectly replicated down to the pixels, ultimately neither machine nor corporation can do what you do: live. Your Work, and your art isn’t a painting, your art is life, and the creative creations you do are signs of that life.
