The Lines Humans Draw

The lines in a drawing made by human hands carry momentum, languor, suppleness, hesitation, sensuality. Some of these qualities are consciously sought; others emerge unconsciously.

In a picture drawn by a person, such qualities are naturally adjusted and woven in.

The word “sensuality” does not mean only sex appeal. We often speak of “mature allure,” but this is a complex thing, and eroticism is no simple matter either — because sex appeal has no pattern.

Even a flesh-and-blood artist cannot easily produce such qualities. For AI, it should be all but impossible.

The Emptiness I Feel in AI Art

I have never asked AI to draw for me, but one look at AI-generated art online makes it obvious. If I had to put it into words, I would say “emptiness.” In the AI art I see online, I sense something hollow.

2001: A Space Odyssey and HAL

This reminds me of a film.

I am very fond of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The original novel is by Arthur C. Clarke.

The film was made in 1968 — more than half a century ago. The conflict between the AI “HAL 9000” and the spaceship crew depicted in it was deeply compelling.

The work aboard the spacecraft is extremely dangerous, and one crew member dies due to an airlock malfunction during a spacewalk. As strange accidents continue, the captain begins to suspect that AI — HAL — is the cause.

HAL can read lips — it can understand speech by observing the movements of the mouth. So the crew retreat to a place beyond HAL’s cameras to discuss what to do. From here, the story grows mysterious.

Watching it, I remember thinking: will AI one day develop a personality — a sense of agency?

“Please Don’t Remove That”

The crew determines that HAL is malfunctioning and begins removing its brain modules — cassette-like data units — one by one. HAL watches through its camera eye and pleads: “Please don’t remove that. Please stop.”

Still, the captain keeps pulling them out. HAL’s voice weakens gradually, as if its flesh were being cut away or its blood drained, until it finally goes silent.

The AI was expressing a will: “I don’t want to die.”

But to stop an AI, you should only need to flip a switch off. So why go through the painstaking process of removing countless cassettes one by one? This was surely a directorial choice for dramatic effect.

And what was HAL — having realized (perhaps) that its own errors had been discovered — trying to protect? If it was self-love, self-respect, pride, then there must have been ego and agency, and perhaps even something as troublesome as a complex.

Yet fortunately — if we may call it that — AI has still not acquired a self, even to this day.

What Only Humans Can Do

As I have written throughout this series, AI has neither identity nor ego. If that is so, then the things that matter most in the work of creating or drawing images are:

  • Feeling
  • Motif
  • Motivation
  • Purpose
  • Critical consciousness

I believe these all carry essentially the same meaning. And I believe that what AI cannot do — what only we, who possess life, can do — lies precisely here.

I am a little tired today. I would like to end here. Bye-bye.

Sadao Tsukioka