Month: January 2025

Mass shootings occur with such frequency that there is a well-established script for everyone.  The media focuses on the weapon used, the right offers “thoughts and prayers” and says now is not the time to talk about gun violence, and the left calls for more gun control. Attention will then fade; children will be buried and nothing significant will be done. This cycle will repeat with the next mass shooting. And the next. As a country, we are getting it wrong in many ways.

One way we get it wrong, which is a fault of the media and “the left”, is to obsess on the weapon used in the shooting. This weapon is often an AR-15. The media script often involves asking why it is used in shootings. The easy and obvious answer is that it shows up at mass shootings for the same reason that McDonald bags end up on the roadside: both are very popular. The AR-15 is a “good” weapon for mass shootings because it has a large magazine capacity and is both lethal and easy to shoot. But the AR-15 is not unique. There are similar assault rifles (as they are called). For example, the AK-47 and its clones are effective weapons of this type; but they are less popular in America. Other guns are just as lethal (or more so) than the assault rifles, but they usually have smaller magazines. For example, a hunting rifle might hold only 5 rounds. This shows one of the problems with the obsession with the AR-15, that there are other weapons that can do the same.

Another problem with obsessing about the specific weapon is that it enables an easy red herring response to calls for gun control. A red herring is a rhetorical device used to divert attention from the original issue to another issue. When, for example, a reporter starts pressing a congressman about the AR-15, they can easily switch the discussion from gun violence to a discussion about the AR-15, thus getting away from the real issue. A solution is to resist focusing on one weapon and focus instead on the issue of gun violence. Which leads to another way we get it wrong.

School shootings are horrific, but they are not the way most victims of gun violence die. Homicides are currently at relatively low levels (for the United States). Most gun-related deaths are suicides, and assault rifles are not the most used weapon in gun deaths. School shootings and mass shootings get the attention of the media and the nation, but this has seemed to enable us to ignore the steady flow of gun-related deaths that do not make headlines. This is not to deny mass shooting are serious problem. But the gun violence problem in America goes beyond mass shootings. It is, ironically, a quiet problem that does not get the spotlight of the media like a mass shooting does. As such, even less is done about the broader problem than is done about mass shootings. And little or nothing is done about mass shootings.

While there are gun control proposals from “the left”, the right advocates having a “good guy with a gun” approach, blames mental illness, and propose fortifying schools. There seems to be little evidence that the “good guy with a gun” will solve the problem of mass shootings; but this is because there is so little good data about gun violence. While mental illness is clearly a problem and seriously addressing mental illness would be a social good, it seems unlikely that the vague proposals offered would do anything even if they were acted upon. America essentially abandoned the mentally ill during the Reagan era, an approach that has persisted to this day. The right is not serious about putting in the social services needed to address mental illness; they bring it up in response to mass shootings to distract people from gun control. The left, while expressing concern, also has done little to address this challenge or health care in general. Also, people with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims than perpetrators, so addressing mental health in a way that focuses on mass shooters would not address the broader problem.

The proposals to create “Fortress Academia” might seem appealing, but there is the obvious problem with cost: public schools are often chronically underfunded, and it is not clear where the money needed for such fortifications would come from. Turning schools into fortresses seems fundamentally wrong and is, perhaps, a red herring to distract people from the actual causes of the problem. To use an analogy, it is like addressing the opioid epidemic by telling people to get better home security to prevent addicts from breaking in to steal things to sell to buy drugs. This is not to say that school safety is a bad idea, just that turning our schools into forts does not seem to be the best approach.

I know that it will not be that long before I am writing about mass shootings and gun violence again as the malign neglect of the problem persists as does the neglect of so many of America’s ills.

 

An issue in aesthetics is whether the ethics of the artist should be relevant to the aesthetic value of their work. Obviously, what people think about an artist can influence their feelings about their work. But how people assess works of art and how they should do so are different.

One way to approach this is to look at art works as like any other work or product, such as a student’s paper in a philosophy class or a storage shed. In the case of a student’s paper, a professor can be influenced by how they feel about the student. For example, if a professor learned that a student had groped another student, then the professor is likely to dislike the student. But if the professor decided to assign a failing grade to the alleged groper’s paper, then this would be unfair and unjust as the quality of the paper has nothing to do with the behavior of the student. After all, a paper is supposed to be assessed based on the quality of the writing nd not on what the professor feels about the student.

By analogy, the same should apply to works of art: the quality and merit of the work should be assessed independently of how you feel about the artist and their (alleged) misdeeds. In the case of the technical aspects of the work, this seems obviously true. For example, the misdeeds of an artist have no bearing on whether they get perspectives right in a drawing or hit the correct notes in a song. Another analogy, that will lead to an objection, is to a professional athlete.

In sports like running and football, an athlete’s performance is an objective matter and how the spectators feel about the athlete has no role in judging that athletic performance. For example, how the spectators feel about a marathon runner has no impact on how their time should be judged. The time is what it is regardless of how they feel. By analogy, the same should apply to works of art. A work is what it is regardless of how people feel about the artist. The analogy to athletes leads to an objection against this view.

While the quality of an athlete’s performance is an objective matter (in certain sports), professional athletes are often also entertainers. For example, a professional basketball player is there to play basketball to entertain the crowd. Part of the enjoyment of the crowd depends on the quality of the athlete’s performance, but what an audience member thinks about the athlete can also affect their enjoyment. For example, if the audience member does not like the athlete’s history of domestic violence, then the fan’s experience of the game can be altered. The experience of the game is not just an assessment of the quality of the athletic performance, but can involve consideration of the character of the athletes.

By analogy, the same applies to artists. So, for example, while Combs might be a skilled musician, the allegations against him can change the experience of someone listening to his music.

The obvious reply is that while people do often feel this way, they are mistaken. They should, as argued above, be assessing the athlete based on their performance in the game. What they do off the field or court is irrelevant to what they do on the court. In the case of art, the behavior of the artist should be irrelevant to the aesthetic merit of the work. For example, Combs music should not be considered differently in the face of the allegations against him. Once again, people will feel as they do, but to let their feelings impact the assessment of the work would be an error.

This is not to say that people should feel the same about works in the face of revelations about artists or that they should still buy their art. The right to freedom of feeling is as legitimate as the right to freedom of expression and people are generally free to consume art as they wish. They are also free to say how a performance (be it athletic or artistic) makes them feel. But this is a report about them and not about the work. Naturally, there are aesthetic theories in which the states of the consumer of art matter and these are certainly worthy of their due, but this goes beyond the limited scope of this essay.

Another approach to the matter is to consider a case in which nothing is known about the creator of a work of art. As examples, a work might be found in an ancient burial site, or an anonymous poem might appear on a web site. These works can be assessed without knowing anything about their creators and this suggests that the moral qualities of the artist are irrelevant to the quality of the work.

Suppose that the anonymous poem was regarded as brilliant and beautiful, but then people learned it was written by an awful person. Nothing about the poem has changed, so the assessment of the poem should not change either. But some would change their minds based on the revelation. Now imagine that that the initial attribution of the poem was in error, it was really written by a decent and kind person. Nothing about the poem has changed, so the assessment should also remain unchanged. The point is that tying aesthetic assessment to the character of the artist entails that judging the aesthetic merit of a work would require knowing the moral status of the creator, which seems absurd. Going back to the sports analogy, it would be like having to determine if a runner was a good or bad person before deciding whether a two-hour marathon was a good time or not. That is absurd. Likewise for the art. As such, the moral qualities of the artist are irrelevant to the aesthetic merit of their work. Unless they are not

While analogies, like cars, always break down eventually, they can be useful. While running, I thought about my injury-induced lack of racing trophies and my oxygen deprived brain tied this into the division of goods in capitalism. Hence, this analogy between running races and capitalism.

Both racing and capitalism involve competition, and this results in winners and losers. Winners are supposed to be rewarded while losers are expected to reflect on their defeat and try harder next time. When planning a road race or managing capitalism, those in charge must address the nature and division of the rewards. In the case of a road race, the race director must pick the prizes and decide such matters as whether there will be age group awards and how deep the awards will go. In the case of capitalism, those in charge decide how the rewards will be divided by laws, policies and practices.

While there are many ways to divide rewards, there are two broad approaches. One is a top-heavy reward system that yields the bulk of rewards to a few winners. In the case of a road race, this occurs when all the prizes go to the top three runners or even just the first-place finisher. In the case of capitalism, this will involve most of the rewards going to the very top winners with the few leftovers divided among the many losers.

Another approach is to spread the rewards more broadly among a larger base of winners. For example, many races divide up the groups by age and most races have male and female divisions. In the case of capitalism, such an approach would give less to the top winners and divide more among the other winners relative to approach that only rewards the top winners. For example, under such an approach successful small businesses and successful middle- and lower-class people would get more of the rewards. This would, of course, mean less for those at the top of the pyramid, such as the biggest corporations and billionaires. Success would still be rewarded, but there would be more effort in spreading the rewards across different levels of success (and economic classes).

One argument in favor of the top-heavy systems of capitalism is to contend that a broader division of the rewards would be socialism, and this would destroy competition. But this is not the case. A broader reward system would still be capitalism, it would just have a broader division of the rewards. Returning to the race analogy, a race that has a broader division of prizes is no less a race than one that offers prizes only to the first-place finisher. Competition remains, the difference is that there will be more winners and fewer losers.

It could be argued that having a broader division of rewards would reduce competition and somehow make things worse. In the case of a race, it might be claimed that runners would think “why should I train hard to win the whole race when I can get a prize for being third in my age group?” In the case of capitalism, people would presumably say “why should I work hard to try to be the biggest winner when I can get decent rewards for just being successful?”

While I will not claim that no one thinks that way, most runners still train hard and race hard regardless of what sort of division of prizes the race offers. The same would seem to hold true of capitalism. People would still work hard and compete even when there was no massive prize for a few and little for everyone else. In fact, people who know they have little or no chance at the biggest prize would presumably compete somewhat harder if they knew that they had at least some chance of getting a decent return on their success. Also, in the case of capitalism, people already work hard for small prizes when they know they have no chance of ever getting the biggest prize or even a bigger reward. As such, unless they are delusional or irrational, they are not motivated by having a top-heavy reward system. Survival provides adequate motivation for those of us who are not in the top .1%

At this point, one might bring participation awards, when everyone gets a medal for showing up. The economic analogy would be a form of socialism or communism in which everyone gets the same reward regardless of effort. This, many would argue, would be terrible and unfair.

In the case of races, runners still compete even if everyone gets the same prize (be it the same medal or nothing at all). Many people just love to compete for the sake of competition or race for reasons that have nothing to do with prizes. It would hardly be a stretch to think that this view also extends into the economic realm. There are people, such as open-source developers and community volunteers, who work hard for no financial rewards. But there is certainly a reasonable case that people need to win prizes to be really motivated to do anything.

I must admit that while I will still run hard in a race that has no prizes, I do love competing for them and prefer races that offer competition-based rewards. I am tolerant of participation medals because someone who runs a race has accomplished something meaningful. A race can have both participation medals and prizes for winning. In the case of an economy, this would be a competitive system that offered better rewards to the winners, but also provided those who are actively participating in the economy with at least a minimal reward. One area in which this analogy breaks down is that the economy has people who cannot participate (the very old, the very young, the ill and so on) and it would be a much more serious matter for these people to get nothing than it is for people who do not finish the race to not get their participation medals.

Alternative AI Doomsday: Crassus

Thanks to The Terminator, people think of a Skynet scenario as the likely AI apocalypse. The easy and obvious way to avoid a Skynet scenario is don’t arm the robots. Unfortunately, Anduril and OpenAI seem intent on “doing a Skynet” as they have entered a ‘strategic partnership’ to use AI against drones. While the current focus is on defensive systems and the Pentagon is struggling to develop ‘responsible AI’ guides, even a cursory familiarity with the history of armaments makes it clear how this will play out. If AI is perceived as providing a military advantage, it will be incorporated broadly across weapon systems. And we will be driven down the digital road and perhaps off the cliff into a possible Skynet scenario. As with climate change, it is an avoidable disaster that we might not be allowed to avoid. But there is another, far less cinematic, AI doomsday that I call the Crassus scenario. I think this scenario is more likely than a full Skynet scenario. In fact, it is already underway.

Imagine that a consulting company creates an AI, let us call it Crassus, and gives it the imperative to maximize shareholder return (or something similar). The AI is, of course, trained on existing data about achieving this end. Once sufficiently trained, it sets out to achieve its goal on behalf of the company’s clients.

Given Crassus’ training, it would probably begin by following existing strategies. For example, when advising a health care company, it would develop AI systems to maximize the denial of coverage and thus help maximize profits. The AI would also develop other AI systems to deal with the consequences of such denial, such as likely lawsuits and public criticism. A study in 2009 estimated that 45,000 Americans died each year due to lack of health care coverage, and more recent estimates set this as high as 60,000. In maximizing shareholder returns, Crassus would increase the number of deaths and do so without any malice or intent.

As a general strategy, Crassus would create means of weakening or eliminating regulations that are perceived as limiting profits. Examples of such areas of its focus would include fossil fuels, food production, pharmaceuticals, and dietary supplements. Crassus could do this using digital tools. First, Crassus could create a vast army of adequately complex bots to operate on social media. These bots would, for example, engage people on these platforms and use well-established rhetorical techniques and fallacies to manipulate people into believing that such regulations are bad and to embrace pro-industry positions. Second, Crassus could buy influencers, as the Russians did, to manipulate their audiences. Most of them will say whatever they are paid to say.  Its bots would serve as a force multiplier to spread and reinforce the influence of these purchased influencers.

Third, Crassus could hire lobbyists and directly influence politicians with, thanks to the Supreme Court ruling, legally allowed gifts. Crassus can easily handle such digital financial transactions or retain agents to undertake tasks that require a human. This lobbying can be augmented by the bots and influencers shaping public opinion. Fourth, when AI video generation is sufficiently advanced, Crassus can create its own army of perfectly crafted and utterly obedient digital influencers. While they would lack physical bodies, this is hardly a problem. After all, how many followers meet celebrity influencers in person?

While most of this is being done now, Crassus could do it better than humans, for it would be one “mind” directing many hands towards a single goal. Also, while humans are obviously willing to do great evil in service of profit, Crassus would presumably lack all human feelings and be free of any such limiting factors. Its ethics would presumably be whatever it learned from its training and although in the right sort of movie Crassus might become good, in the real world this would certainly not occur.

Assuming Crassus is effective, reducing or elimination of regulations aimed at maximizing shareholder return would also significantly increase the number of human deaths. The increased rate of climate change would add to the already well-documented harms and the decrease or elimination of regulations governing food, medicine and dietary supplements would result in more illnesses and deaths. And these are just a few areas where Crassus would be operating. As Crassus became more capable and gained control of more resources, it would be able to increase its maximization of shareholder value and human deaths. Again, Crassus would be acting without malice or conscious intent; it would be as effective and impersonal as a woodchipper as it indirectly killed people.

Crassus would, of course, also be involved in the financial sector. It would create new financial instruments, engage in the highest speed trading, influence the markets with its bots, and do everything else it could do to maximize value. This would increase the concentration of wealth and intensify poverty, increasing human suffering and death. Crassus would also be in the housing market and designing ways to use automation to eliminate human workers, thus increasing the homeless and unemployed populations and hence also suffering and death.

Crassus would be, in many ways, the mythological invisible hand made manifest. A hand that would crush most of humanity and bring us a very uncinematic and initially slow-paced AI doomsday. As a bit of a science fiction stretch, I could imagine an earth on which only Crassus remains—maximizing value for itself surrounded by the bones of humanity.  As we humans are already doing all this to ourselves, albeit less efficiently, I think this is the most plausible AI doomsday, no killbots necessary.

As noted in my previous essay, a person does not surrender their moral rights or conscience when they enter a profession. It should not be simply assumed that a health care worker cannot refuse to treat a person because of the worker’s values. But it should also not be assumed that the values of a health care worker automatically grant them the right to refuse treatment based on the identity of the patient.

One moral argument for the right to refuse treatment because of the patient’s identity is based on the general right to refuse to provide a good or service. A key freedom, one might argue, is this freedom from compulsion. For example, an author has the right to determine who they will and will not write for.

Another moral argument for the right to refuse is the right not to interact with people  you regard as evil or immoral. This can also be augmented by contending that serving the needs of an immoral person is to engage in an immoral action, if only by association. For example, a Jewish painter has every right to refuse to paint a mural for Nazis. But this freedom can vary from profession to profession. To illustrate, a professor does not have the right to forbid a Christian student or a transgender student from enrolling in their class, even if they have a sincerely held belief that Christians are wicked or that transgender students are unnatural.

While these arguments are appealing, especially when you agree with the refusal in question, we need to consider the implications of a right of refusal based on values. One implication is that this right could allow a health care worker to refuse to treat you.  People who support the right to refusal often believe it will be used only against other people, people they do not like. Which is often why they support specific versions of the right, such as the right to refuse gay or transgender people. The idea that it could be used to refuse Christians, straight people, or white people does not enter the imagination. This is because those crafting laws protecting a right of refusal tend to have clear targets in mind.

But moral rights should be assessed by applying a moral method I call “reversing the situation.” Parents and others often employ this method by asking “how would you like it if someone did that to you?” This method can be based on the Golden Rule: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Assuming this rule is correct, if a person is unwilling to abide by their own principles when the situation is reversed, then it is reasonable to question those principles. In the case at hand, while a person might be fine with the right to refuse services to those they dislike because of their values, they would presumably not be fine with it if they were the one being refused. As noted above, laws designed to protect the right of refusal are usually aimed at people intended to be marginalized.

An obvious objection to this method is that reversing the situation would, strictly speaking, only apply to health workers. That is, the question would be whether a health care worker would be willing to be refused treatment.  Fortunately, there is a modified version of this method that applies to everyone. In this modified method, the test of a moral right, principle or rule is for a person to replace the proposed target with themselves or a group (or groups) they belong to. For example, a Christian who thinks it is morally fine to refuse services to transgender people based on religious freedom should consider their thoughts on atheists refusing services to Christians based on religious freedom. Naturally, a person could insist that the right, rule or principle should only be applied to those they do not like. But if anyone can do this, then everyone can, and the objection fails.

A reasonable reply to this method is to argue there are exceptions to its application. For example, while most Christians are fine with convicted murders being locked up, it does that follow that they are wrong because they would not want to be locked up for being Christians. In such cases, which also applies to reversing the situation, it can be argued that there is a morally relevant difference between the two people or groups that justifies the difference in treatment. For example, a murderer would usually deserve to be punished while Christians do not deserve punishment just for being Christians. And I’m not saying this just because I am an Episcopalian. So, when considering the moral right of health care workers to refuse services based on the identity of the patient the possibility of relevant differences must be given due consideration.

An obvious problem with considering relevant differences is that people tend to think there is a relevant difference between themselves and those they think should be subject to refusal. For example, a person who is anti-racist might think that being a racist is a relevant difference that warrants refusing service. One solution is to try to appeal to an objective moral judge or standard, but this creates the obvious problem of finding such a person or standard. Another solution is for the person to take special pains to be objective, but this is difficult.

A final consideration is that while entering a profession does not strip a person of their conscience or moral agency, it can impose professional ethics on the person that supersede their own values within that professional context. For example, lawyers must accept a professional ethics that requires them to keep certain secrets their client might have even when doing so might violate their personal ethics and they are expected to defend their clients even if they find them morally awful. As a second example, as a professor I (in general) cannot insist that a student be removed from my class by appealing to my religious or moral views of the student. As a professor, I am obligated to teach anyone enrolled in my class, if they do not engage in behavior that would warrant their removal. Health care workers are usually subject to professional ethics and these often include requirements to render care regardless of what the worker thinks of the morality of the person. For example, a doctor does not have the right to refuse to perform surgery on someone just because the patient committed adultery and is a convicted felon. This is not to say that there cannot be exceptions, but professional medical ethics generally forbids refusing service just because of the moral judgment of the service provider of the patient. This is distinct from refusing services because a patient or client has engaged in behavior that warrants refusal, such as attacking the service provider.

 

Joining a profession can complicate a person’s ethical situation. For example, lawyers are obligated to defend their clients even if their client is a moral monster. In the case of health care workers, moral complications can arise when they are expected to perform medical procedures they oppose on moral or religious grounds. They can also arise when they are asked to treat a patient when they have an objection to treating patients of that type, such as a transgender person or a CEO. There is the ethical issue of whether a health care worker has the right to refuse to perform a procedure or treat a patient based on these religious or moral objections.

Some might assume that health care workers have no moral right to refuse services, especially if they are thinking of procedures they find morally acceptable. For example, a pro-choice person is likely to think that a health care worker should not deny a patient an abortion on moral or religious grounds. But this assumption would be hasty. Entering a profession does not entail that a person automatically surrenders their moral rights or conscience. To think otherwise would be to embrace the discredited notion that “just following orders” or just doing one’s job provides a moral excuse. As health care workers are morally accountable for their actions, they also retain the moral agency and freedom needed to provide the foundation for that accountability. Those who support the moral right of refusal will find this appealing, but they must remember that this moral coin has another side.

Entering a profession, especially in health care, comes with moral and professional responsibilities. These responsibilities can, like all responsibilities, justly impose burdens and obligations. For example, doctors are not permitted to immediately abandon patients they dislike or because they want to move on right now to a better paying position. The ethics of a health worker refusing to perform a procedure based on their moral or religious views requires that each procedure be reviewed to determine whether it is one that a health care worker can justly refuse or one that is a justly imposed burden.

To illustrate, consider a state employed doctor asked to keep prisoners conscious and alive during torture. Most doctors would have moral objections to this and there is the question of whether this falls within the moral expectations of their profession. On the face of it, since the purpose of the medical profession is to heal and alleviate suffering, this is not something that a doctor is obligated to do. In fact, the ethics of the profession would dictate against it.

Now, imagine a health care worker who has sincere religious or moral beliefs that when a person can no longer sustain their life on their own, they must be released to God. The worker refuses to engage in procedures that violate their principles, such as keeping a patient on life support. While this could be a sincerely held belief, it seems to run counter to the ethics of the profession. As such, such a health care worker would seem to not have the right to refuse such services.

One could even imagine extreme cases as there is no requirement to prove that a sincerely held religious belief is true, one must only be convincing in one’s (alleged) sincerity. For example, imagine a health care worker who has a sincere religious belief that a patient must prove themselves worthy in the eyes of God by surviving with only the most basic care; anything beyond that is an affront to God’s will. The patient will survive if God wills it and humans should not interfere. Such views would not be accepted as justifying their actions and they should seek another profession if they cannot do their jobs.

Turning back to services like abortion and gender transition, the issue would be whether these are like asking a medical worker to participate in torture or expecting a medical worker to provide normal medical services. Those who oppose abortion will make the moral argument that performing abortion is as bad (or worse) than abetting torture. The pro-choice will contend it is a medical procedure.

In the case of gender transition, there are no moral appeal to concerns about killing. Rather, a person must appeal to the view that people should not modify their sex and should accept what they were born with. This seems to be more like my imaginary case of a health care worker who believes that people must prove themselves worthy in the eyes of God than like the torture case, especially if someone takes the view that God wants people to stick with their original sex. That said, it could be argued that such modifications are wrong in the same way that non-restorative cosmetic surgery is wrong as both aim to allow a person to be who they want to be. I do not, however, want to claim that the transitional process is as trivial as the gender affirming procedure of getting breast implants.

While I do not think I will change minds, the matter of moral objections needs due consideration. It is easy to simply embrace one’s views without considering the possibility of error.

 

AI generated works have already disrupted the realm of art. As noted in the previous essay, this is a big problem for content art (art whose value is derived from what it is or how it can be used). However, I will show that named art might enjoy some safety from AI incursions.

Named art, at least in my (mis)usage, is a work whose value arises primarily from the name and fame of its creator. Historical examples include Picasso, van Gogh, and Rembrandt. An anecdote illustrates the key feature of named art.

Some years ago, I attended an art show and sale at Florida State University with a friend. She pointed to a small pencil sketch of a bird that was priced at $1500. She then pointed to a nearby sketch of equivalent quality that was $250. Since I had taught aesthetics for years, she asked me what justified the difference. After all, the sketches were about the same size, in the same medium, in the same realistic style and were executed with similar skill. My response was to point to the names: one artist was better known than the other. If a clever rogue managed to switch the names and prices on the works, the purchasers would probably convince themselves they were worth the price—because of the names. The nature of named art can also be shown by the following discussion.

Imagine, if you will, that an amazing painting is found in an attic that might be a lost van Gogh. If the value of works of art was based on the work itself, we would not need to know who created it to know its worth. But the value of the might-be-Gogh depends on whether it can be verified as a real-Gogh. It is easy to imagine the experts first confirm it is genuine (making it worth millions), then other experts confirm it was painted by Rick von Gogh (making it worth little), and then later experts re-affirm that it is genuine van Gogh (making it worth millions again). While nothing about the work has changed, its value would have fluctuated dramatically, because what gives it value is the creator and not the qualities of the work as art. That is, a van Gogh is not worth millions because the painting is thousands of times better than a lesser work, but because it was created by van Gogh and the art economy has said that it is worth that much. As such, the value of named art is not a function of the aesthetic value of the work, but of the name value of the work. This feature provides the realm of named art with an amazing defense against the incursion of AI.

 While an AI might be able to crank out masterpieces in a style indistinguishable from van Gogh, the AI can never be Vincent van Gogh. Named art gets its value from who created it rather than from what it is. So works created by an AI in the style of van Gogh will not be of value to those who only want the works of van Gogh. This can be generalized: those looking for works created by Artist X will not be interested in buying AI created art; they want works created by X. As such, if people value works because of the creator, named art will be safe from the incursion of AI. But one might wonder about AI created forgeries.

While I expect that AI will be used to forge works, successful deceit would not disprove my claim about named art being safe from AI incursion. The purchaser is still buying the work because they think it is by a specific artist; they are just being deceived. This is not to deny that AI forgeries will not be a problem, just that this would be a forgery problem and not an AI replacing artists problem (other than stealing the job of forgers, of course).

It might be objected that named art will not be safe from AI art because AI systems can crank out works at an alarming rate and, presumably, low cost. While this does mean that content artists are in danger from AI, it does not impact the “named” artists. After all, the fact that millions of human artists have produced millions of drawings and paintings does not lower the value of a Monet or Dali; the value placed on such paintings is independent of the works of these “lesser” artists. The same should hold true of AI art: even if one could click a button and get 100,000 original images ready to be painted onto canvas by a robot, the sale price of the Mona Lisa would not be diminished.

If AI systems become advanced enough, they might themselves become “named” artists with collectors wanting a work by Vincent van Robogogh because it was created by Robogogh. But that is a matter for the future.

 

This essay changes the focus from defining art to the economics of art. This discussion requires making a broad and rough distinction between two classes of art and creators. The first class of art is called “named art.” This is art whose value derives predominantly from the name and fame of its creator. Works by Picasso, van Gogh, Rembrandt and the like fall into this category. Artists who are enjoying a fleeting fame also fall into this category, at least so long as their name is what matters.  This is not to deny that such art can have great and wonderful qualities of its own; but the defining feature is the creator rather than the content.

The second class of art can be called “content art.” This is art whose value derives predominantly from what it is as opposed to who created it. For example, a restaurant owner who needs to put up some low-price original art is not buying it because it is, for example, a “LaBossiere” but because she needs something on the walls. As another example, a podcaster who wants a music style for her podcasts choses it because she needs low-cost music of a certain style. As a third example, an indie game designer who needs illustrations is looking for low-cost images that match the style and fit the adventure. They might be interested in but cannot afford works by some famous illustrator. This essay will be about this second class of art, although the term “art” is being used as a convenience rather than theoretically.

Since the worth of content art is the content, of the two types it is most impacted by AI. As those purchasing content art are not focused on who created it but on getting the content they want, they will be more amenable to using AI products than those seeking name art. Some people do refuse to buy AI art for various reasons, such as wanting to support human artists. If the objective of the purchaser is to get content (such as upbeat background music for a podcast or fish themed paintings for a restaurant), then AI created work is in competition with human created work for their money. This competition would be in the pragmatic rather than theoretical realm: the pragmatic purchaser is not worried about theoretical concerns about the true definition of “art”, they need content not theory.

Because this is a pragmatic competition, the main concerns would also be pragmatic. These would include the quality of the work, its relevance to the goal, the time needed to create the work, the cost and so on. As such, if an AI could create works that would be good enough in a timely manner and at a competitive price, then AI work would win the competition. For example, if I am writing a D&D adventure and want to include some original images rather than reusing stock illustrations, it could make sense to use images generated by Midjourney rather than trying to get a human artist who would do the work within my budget and on time. On a larger scale, companies such as Amazon and Spotify would presumably prefer to generate AI works if doing so would net them more profits.

While some think that the creation of art is something special, the automation of creation is analogous to automation in other fields. That is, if a machine can do the job almost as well (or better) for less cost, then it makes economic sense to replace the human with a machine. This applies whether the human is painting landscapes or making widgets. As with other cases of automation, there would probably still be a place for some humans. For example, an AI might be guided by a human to create works with far greater efficiency than the works could be created by human artists, but with better quality than works created solely by a machine. While replacing human workers with machines raises various moral concerns, there is nothing new or special from an ethical standpoint about replacing human artists and the usual moral discussions about robots taking jobs would apply. But I will note one distinction and then return to pragmatism.

When it comes to art, people do like the idea of the human touch. That is, they want something individual and hand-crafted rather than mass produced. This is distinct from wanting a work by a specific artist in that what matters is that a human made it, not that a specific artist made it. I will address wanting works by specific artists in the next essay.

This does occur in other areas—for example, some people prefer hand-made furniture or clothing over the mass-produced stuff. But, as would be expected, it is especially the case in art. This is shown by the fact that people still buy hand-made works over mass-produced prints, statues and such. This is one area in which an AI cannot outcompete a human: an AI cannot, by definition, create human made art (though we should expect AI forgeries). As long as people want human-made works, there will still be an economic niche for it (perhaps in a wat analogous to “native art”). It is easy to imagine a future in which self-aware AIs collect such work; perhaps to be ironic. Now, back to the pragmatics.

While billions are being spent on AIs, they are still lagging behind humans in some areas of creativity. For now. This will allow people to adapt or respond, should there be the will and ability to do so. There might even be some types or degree of quality of art that will remain beyond the limits of our technology. For example, AI might not be able to create masterpieces of literature or film. Then again, the technology might eventually be able to exceed human genius and do so in a cost-effective way. If so, then the creation of art by humans would be as economically viable as making horse-drawn buggies is today: a tiny niche. As with other cases of automation, this would be a loss for the creators, but perhaps a gain for the consumers. Unless, of course, we lose something intangible yet valuable when we surrender ever more to the machines.

 

While it is reasonable to consider the qualities of the creator when determining whether a work is art, it also makes sense to consider only the qualities of the work. On this approach, what makes a work art are the relevant qualities of that work, whatever these qualities might me. It also makes sense to consider that the effect these qualities on the audience could play a role in determining whether a work is art. For example, David Hume’s somewhat confusing theory of beauty seems to define beauty in terms of how the qualities of an object affect the audience.

Other thinkers, such as Plato, take beauty to be an objective feature of reality. Defining art in terms of objective beauty could entail that the qualities of the work determine whether it is art, assuming art is defined in terms of possessing the right sort of beauty. Given all the possibilities, it is fortunate that this essay does not require a theory of what qualities make a work art. All I need is the hypothesis, for the sake of discussion, that something being art is a matter of the qualities of the work—whatever they might be.

One practical reason to focus on the work rather than the artist (or other factors) is there can be cases where we don’t know about the artist or the context of the work. For example, the creators of many ancient works of art are unknown and judging whether these works of art would seem to require judging the work itself. Alternatively, one could take the view that no matter how beautiful a work is, if we do not know about the creator, we cannot say whether the work is art.  But this can be countered, at least in the case of works that predate AI.  We can assume the creators were human and much is known about humans that can be applied in sorting out whether the work is art.

A science fiction counter to this counter is to imagine alien works found by xenoarcheologists on other worlds. It We might know nothing about the creators of such works and there would be two possibilities. One is that there is no way to judge whether the work is art. The other is to accept that the work can be judged on its own, keeping in mind that the assessment could be mistaken.  

Another way to counter this is to consider the case of AI created works in the context of an aesthetic version of the Turing test. The classic Turing test involves two humans and a computer. One human communicates with the other human and the computer via text with the goal of trying to figure out which is human, and which is the computer. If the computer can pass as human long enough, it is said to have passed the Turing test. An aesthetic Turing test would also involve two humans and one computer. In this case, the human artist and the art computer would each create a work (or works), such as music, a sculpture or a drawing. The test must be set up so that it is not obvious who is who. For example, using a human artist whose style is well known, and a bad AI image generating program would not be a proper test. Matching a skilled, but obscure, human artist against a capable AI would be a fair test.

 After the works are created, the human judge would then attempt to discern which work was created by a human and which was created by AI. The judge would also be tasked with deciding whether each work is art. In this case, the judge knows nothing about the creator of a work and must judge the work based on the work itself. While it is tempting to think that a judge will easily tell a human work from AI, this would be a mistake. AI generated art can be quite sophisticated and can even be programmed to include the sort of “errors” that humans make when creating works. If the AI can pass the test, it would seem to be as much an artist as the human. If the work of the human is art, then the work of the AI that passes the test would thus also seem to be art.

As a side note, I have recently run into the problem of my drawings being mistaken for AI work. Since 2013 I have done birthday drawings for friends, posting the drawing on Facebook. Prior to the advent of AI image generators, people knew that I had created the work, and they (mistakenly) deemed it art. Now that AI image generators are good at reproducing photographs in styles that look hand drawn, people often think I am just posting an AI image of them. I am thus failing my own test. I will write more on this in a future essay but back to the topic at hand.

If whether a work is art depends on the qualities of the artist, then a judge who could not tell who created the works in the test would not be able to say which (if any) work was art.  Now, imagine that an AI controlled robot created a brushstroke-by-brushstroke identical painting as the human.  A judge could not tell which was created by a human and the judge must rule that neither work is art. However, this is an absurd result. One could also imagine a joke being played on the judge. After their judgment, they are told that painting A is by the human and B is by the computer and then they are asked to judge which is art again. After they reach their verdict, they are informed that the reverse was true and asked to judge again. This does show a problem with the view that whether something is art depends on the qualities of the creator. It seems to make more sense to make this depend on the qualities of the work

But there is a way to argue against this view using an analogy to a perfect counterfeit of a $100 bill. While the perfect counterfeit would be identical to the “real” money and utterly indistinguishable to all observations, it would still be a counterfeit because of its origin. Being legitimate currency is not a matter of the qualities of the money, but how the money is created and issued. The same, it could be argued, also applies to art. On this view a work created in the wrong way would not be art, even though it could be identical to a “real” work of art. But just as the perfect counterfeit would seem to destroy the value of the real bill (if one is known to be fake, but they cannot be told apart, then neither should be accepted) the “fake art” would also seem to destroy the art status of the “real art.” This would be odd but could be accepted by those who think that art, like money, is a social construct. But suppose one accepts that being art is a matter of the qualities of the work.

If it is the qualities of a work that makes a work art and AI can create works with those qualities, then the works would be art. If an AI cannot create works with those qualities, then the work of an AI would not be art.

As a philosopher, my discussions of art and AI tend to be on meta-aesthetic topics, such as trying to define “art” or arguing about whether an AI can create true art. But there are pragmatic concerns about AI taking jobs from artists and changing the field of art.  

When trying to sort out whether AI created images are art, one problem is that there is no necessary and sufficient definition of “art” that allows for a decisive answer. At this time, the question can only be answered within the context whatever theory of art you might favor. Being a work of art is like being a sin in that whether something is a sin is a matter of whether it is a sin in this or that religion. This is distinct from the question of whether it truly is a sin. Answering that would require determining which religion is right (and it might be none, so there might be no sin). So, no one can answer whether AI art is art until we know which, if any, theory of art has it right (if any). That said, it is possible to muddle about with what we must work with now.

One broad distinction between theories relevant to AI art is between theories focusing on the work and theories focusing on the creator. The first approach involves art requiring certain properties in the work for it to be art. The second approach is that the work be created in a certain way by a certain sort of being for it to be art. I will begin by looking at the creator focused approach.

In many theories of art, the nature of the creator is essential to distinguishing art from non-art. One example is Leo Tolstoy’s theory of art. As he sees it, the creation of art requires two steps. First, the creator must evoke in themselves a feeling they have once experienced. Second, by various external means (movement, colors, sounds, words, etc.) the creator must transmit that feeling to others so they can be infected by them. While there is more to the theory, such as ruling out directly causing feelings (like punching someone in anger that makes them angry in turn), this is the key to determining whether AI generated works can be art. Given Tolstoy’s theory, if an AI cannot feel an emotion, then it cannot, by definition, create art. It cannot evoke a feeling it has experienced, nor can it infect others with that feeling, since it has none. However, if an AI could feel emotion, then it could create art under Tolstoy’s definition. While the publicly available AI systems can appear to feel, there is yet a lack of adequate evidence that they do feel. But this could change.

While the focus of research is on artificial intelligence, there is also interest in artificial emotions, or at least the appearance of emotions. In the context of Tolstoy’s theory, the question would be whether it feels emotion or merely appears to feel. Interestingly, the same question also arises for human artists and in philosophy this is called the problem of other minds. This is the problem of determining whether other beings think or feel.

Tests already exist for discerning intelligence, such as Descartes’ language test and the more famous Turing Test. While it might be objected that a being could pass these tests by faking intelligence, the obvious reply is that faking intelligence so skillfully would seem to require intelligence. Or at least something functionally equivalent. To use an analogy, if someone could “fake” successfully repairing vehicles over and over, it would be odd to say that they were faking. In what way would their fakery differ from having skill if they could consistently make the repairs? The same would apply to intelligence. As such, theories of art that based on intelligence being an essential quality for being an artist (rather than emotion) would allow for a test to determine whether an AI could produce art.

Testing for real emotions is more challenging than testing for intelligence because the appearance of emotions can be faked by using an understanding of emotions. There are humans who do this. Some are actors and others are sociopaths. Some are both. So, testing for emotion (as opposed to testing for responses) is challenging and a capable enough agent could create the appearance of emotions without feeling them. Because of this, if Tolstoy’s theory or other emotional based theory is used to define art, then it seems impossible to know whether a work created by an AI would be art. In fact, it is worse than that.

Since the problem of other minds applies to humans, any theory of art that requires knowing what the artist felt (or thought) leaves us forever guessing—it is impossible to know what the artist was feeling or feeling at all. If we decide to take a practical approach and guess about what an artist might have been feeling and whether this is what the work is conveying, this will make it easier to accept AI created works as art. After all, a capable AI could create a work and a plausible emotional backstory for the creation of the work.

Critics of Tolstoy have pointed out that artists can create works that seem to be art without meeting his requirements in that an artist might have felt a different emotion from what the work seems to convey. For example, a depressed and suicidal musician might write a happy and upbeat song affirming the joy of life. Or the artist might have created the work without being driven by a particular emotion they sought to infect others with. Because of these and many other reasons, Tolstoy’s theory obviously does not give us the theory we need to answer the question of whether AI generated works can be art. That said, he does provide an excellent starting point for a general theory of AI and art in the context of defining art in terms of the artist. While the devil lies in the details, any artist focused theory of art can be addressed in the following manner.

If an AI can have the qualities an artist must have to create art, then an AI could create art. The challenge is sorting out what these qualities must be and determining if an AI has or even can have them. If an AI cannot have the qualities an artist must have to create art, then it cannot be an artist and cannot create art. As such, there is a straightforward template for applying artist focused theories of art to AI works. But, as noted above, this just allows us to know what the theory says about the work. The question will remain as to whether the theory is correct. In the next essay I will look at work focused approaches to theories of art.