Art: A Unifying Model (The Ghost in the Text) [Part 1]
My name is Abraham Haskins. I am a cognitive scientist, an engineer, a psychologist, and an AI systems architect. I'm an overeducated millennial with five degrees scattered throughout surprisingly relevant fields for the points I'm going to make, and the most relevant is a PhD.
In this essay I will use plain english to: define a unifying model for art (with accompanying graph), explain the neurology behind how art works, define the mechanism for an incoming AI-driven cognitive catastrophe, fully flesh out a solution, and then close by showing how the application of this model suggests we focus on a specific strategy for helping align AI.
After, I'll abandon the plain english to trace out an equation describing the model and then close with a proposed set of hypotheses and a plea.
Before you read this, let me be clear: I wrote every fucking word of black text on these pages. I know we’re all suspicious of long bits of text these days, and I’m going to spend the next several pages explaining why. But I want to ask for your trust up front: I, a human wrote this, and I truly want you to read it.
No AI would EVER open like this: it's unprofessional, a little embarrassing, and undercuts my point. Excellent. Let's begin.
AI's intrusion into art has quietly and subtly confirmed for us what art truly is: art is compressed intent.
Let’s be precise here. “Art” describes any creation into which a thinking being invested a large concentration of decisions, all in the service of one or more goals [1]. That creation can be a painting, a speech, a book, a bridge, a dance, a makeup application, a headstand or… really anything. Anytime any thinking being makes a high concentration of decisions, and that volume of decisions creates something, that creation is art. [2]
You'll note that definition encapsulates pretty much all of human activity. You are correct. It will not surprise you to hear that under my model anything can be art in the right situation and with the right viewer. We're going to be speaking most about how "artful" something is. It's simple: if more decisions are made in the creation of something, it is more artful (or artsy, if you prefer) [3]. Everyone has their own personal threshold for how dense the decisions need to be for the resulting creation to be "art" in their eyes, but we will be instead putting all human activity on a scale of "artfulness." We’re going to make a graph with this, so let’s put that on the X-axis: things on the left are less artful, and things on the right more so.
The Y-Axis defines whether the art is good or bad. Whether art is good or bad depends on whether the artist met the goal implied by the actions taken. [4] This is the pivotal key to appreciation, because you, the viewer, get to decide what their goal was. In doing so, you decide if you agree it was a respectable or worthy goal, and (more importantly) you get to decide if they met it [5].
Art is "good" when you judge the artist's goal as having been met. If you judge the artist's goal to be unworthy of respect but agree they met it, you may not respect the artist, but you will still tend to classify their work as "good art" [6]. A prime example is a skillful speech given by an evil man. Imagine a hypothetical painting that inspired a nation to evil just like Hitler’s speeches did. Would you call that painting “bad”? I feel most would begrudgingly admit that it was technically good in quality - before calling it misguided and evil [7].
Alternatively, failing to achieve a goal worthy of respect results in a "noble failure," like a director biting off more than they can chew. You might agree with some decisions and say parts of it are good, but you wouldn’t call the whole piece "good art."
So when we speak casually about "good" or "bad" art of any kind - what we mean is that the artist accomplished their goals, as we infer them. And that's our Y-axis.
So there, now we have two axes. Let’s draw it out:
My (very human) editors suggested I add this section. Previously, I just let that graph stand on its own, but they suggested a bit of exploration here.
Let’s start here. A… or B?
But is this a robust principle - can we subdivide it? What about people who use reference photos? What if you trace over a real photo rather than a cartoon? What if we use a reference photo, but only from memory?
We can disagree on the specifics, of course.
Let's do the same thing when moving up and down the Y-axis. Imagine you saw someone go to incredible lengths to flawlessly trace a cartoon using tons of machinery - lasers, and so on. They made the whole contraption. You know exactly what their goal was. They told you what their goal was, in fact. And there's some artistry to be seen in the effort of chasing extreme precision
But in the end - they didn't trace the cartoon properly! It’s super janky looking. Would you call their highly flawed recreation “good art” or “bad art”?
I’d just reflexively call it bad. I think everyone would.
But what if I showed you the exact same tracing - only now from an artist that made stylistic changes on purpose? All of a sudden you look at the imperfections differently [8]. You don't really know the artist's motivation anymore, so you have to guess at why they made those changes, and that guess informs whether you think it's good or bad. Maybe they made a hated politician’s nose larger, and you think that’s a great (or terrible) way to make a point. And that, then, becomes your interpretation of whether the art is good (or bad).
Respecting an artist's competence is not inherently an assessment of beauty; it is the byproduct of reverse-engineering another primate's problem-solving strategy.
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(Continued on my portfolio, directly linked in page description at the top)
