Not Everything Needs to Be Useful
On artificial intelligence, art, and utility
Opinions about AI aren’t hard to come by these days.
Some think AI is a wonderful technological advancement that will lead to unmatched productivity and economic growth, leading us into some sort of new industrial age of wealth, prosperity, and freedom.
Others think AI is a scourge on society, a threat to jobs that will drive further disparity between the haves and the have-nots, and that it has the ability to demolish much of what it means to live a fulfilling live as a finite being on an amazing planet in an infinite universe.
Most, it seems, find themselves someplace in the middle of these two poles, perhaps seeing some value of AI’s ability to automate parts of jobs that no one seems to enjoy while also feeling a bit squeamish about how artificial intelligence could eventually do more harm than good in ways we may not yet even be able to fathom.
I haven’t written much about AI, and I still don’t plan to make any attempts to be an “AI though leader” of any kind, but as I wrote a bit in this newsletter last summer, maybe my greatest concern about the relentless adoration of AI right now is how it seems to have catapulted “productivity” to the top of many priority lists.
Before we go any further I want to make clear that I am impressed with how I have seen AI augment productivity. I just started a new job last month, and I have been using Claude a good bit to help me brush up on some skills that I haven’t used in a while. Without a doubt I have seen the benefit of AI in some aspects of my work, even as I take great care to not become overly reliant on it in any part of my job.
What I mean to say is that I see the appeal—the performative boost and administrative support provided by artificial intelligence is not just smoke and mirrors, even if some of the marketing seems a bit blustery. AI has real utility that I have seen and experienced myself.
At the same time, one of the best cautions I’ve read about AI is some version of, “Don’t use AI to augment any skill you hope to improve,” and I think we would be wise to heed cautions like these, too.
The most common case I see others make for the proliferation of AI—in Christian circles and otherwise—is how integrating artificial intelligence into our lives and work will “lead to levels of productivity and utility that mankind has never seen in its history.”
And I just don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing.
Utility Is Not Paramount
While I am not one to deny that AI has great utility, I think what concerns me is the degree to which it seems we have started to prioritize utility above all, perhaps because AI is so useful.1
Like with so many technological advancements, so it is with AI: perhaps our concern ought not to be with the product of the technology but with what using the technology does to us.
In his keynote speech last fall at the Dragonsteel Nexus conference, sci-fi/fantasy author Brandon Sanderson shared a quote from Oscar Wilde’s prologue to The Picture of Dorian Gray:
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.
Sanderson goes on to say that one of his greatest concerns about AI is that it “seems to be too focused on the product and not the process,” which is another caution and concern we ought to heed.
Something is lost when we prioritize yield over the toil and experience it took to produce the yield—certainly in the case of art, but also in the case of other kinds of work!
Like Sanderson, one of my greatest concerns regarding the pervasiveness of artificial intelligence its inherent appeal to eliminate friction. This concern may not be as strong in the area of accounting as it is in the world of art.
Art Is Meant to Be Born Through Struggle
The best art is more than what it is.
The best art finds at least some of its beauty in the scars it took to become its finished self.
The best art is born out of friction and struggle, not in spite of it.
When we use artificial intelligence to shortcut the creative process, we produce less art and more content—these two things are not the same.
Content is meant to be consumed, art is meant to be felt.
We live in a time in which it has become widely acceptable to consume everything all of the time.
Like vacuums we suck up all the content we can, filter out what we don’t like, and never process anything that may be too difficult for us to handle.
All the impressive AI models we see today can create content more content for us than we could ever hope to consume, but they cannot create the kind of art that can make us feel. Such art requires us to connect with the struggle and the friction that had to be endured by the artist to create the art we engage. And the frictionless experience of plugging in a prompt leaves no scars to adorn the beauty of the finished product.
Even more, as Sanderson highlights, creating art does something to the artist. In a sense, he says, “You are the art,” and without the creative process, the artist is not transformed by the work.
Art is fruit that sprouts along the twisting vines of expression and vulnerability born in sweat and tears and struggle.
Art is not efficient, nor is it often useful.
And that’s part of what makes it beautiful.
For more on prioritizing utility above all, just go read Jacques Ellull on technique and how our pursuit of absolute efficiency in every area of life has detrimental effects we may not see until it is too late.
What I see you contrasting is 'what a man produces' and 'what a man becomes.' The goal, from a Christian perspective, is man is involved in a process which transforms him into the image of Christ --and process that is not efficient nor fast. From the world's perspective--not what a man becomes but what he produces which can then be monetized.
This is so good. AI can take the essence out of what it means to be human. This reminds me of C.S. Lewis’s “Abolition of Man,” where he talks about man as the machine. We were never meant to be driven toward merely the product itself. Great words!!!