familiarity breeds contempt; the art of humanity's creation
A mother’s hands are the first to cradle her special one’s head against her chest, mumbling about her child’s beauty. In the same way an artist may treasure their work, she will look at the infant with a smile, knowing her creation shares parts of what she is made of. The baby could hold her finger in her hand; her touch is the first sensory experience a child will have.
As the kid moves through toddlerhood, most of the memories will be of toys, nature, books, movies, and art. The little fingers that once were accustomed to holding the parent’s hand will touch most they can see, the hands flexing around every material they pick up and investigate with a young, curious mind. Soon, the hand will hold a crayon instead of the binkie and blanket. The first art a child will create will most likely be a tracing of their hand. It will come out a little shaky, but it will ultimately remain a depiction of a young hand.
In their family, the juvinile will learn about culture, cooking, and crafts. The hands will clap to a song, help grandma knead bread dough, and sit for hours in a garage with dad, giving him a wrench or a screwdriver. The child may color with an uncle or tumble with a sibling. Their palms will be stained with mud, grass, and paint, and as they grow up, the paint will swap to ink stains. Ultimately, the hands will hold your past and your future.
But our future isn’t heading toward touch and connection; the stark contrast we face is the growing rise of artificial intelligence. We trust a screen, hooked up to wires, to guide us through an assignment or a recipe, or to create something for us. Media illiteracy is on the rise, and some of us would rather ask a computer to explain what it is, in simple terms, of course, “so a three-year-old would understand”, rather than spending time scouring the internet and dictionaries. A short attention span and a video essay playing at 1.5x speed are the new norm. For art projects, some will ask AI to generate an image for the assignment, tweak it just enough to submit it digitally. And they will be believed. The soulless depiction of a human through the eyes of AI will flood the media as we experiment with the tool and rave on how intelligent it’s getting, not fully grasping how frightening that truly is.
The hands we used to use to create with passion now turn into mindless typing and clicking because it’s more efficient that way. Before being accused of plagiarising, a writer will face claims that they used AI to author their book. A computer will create the hand-drawn covers for the sewn-together pages.
Scientifically, we are all referred to as “homo sapiens” – and every dictionary will tell us the same thing: the modern, intelligent human connected together as a species. The same species that printed the first book in 1468 now puts multiple novels on the shelves every month. The letterpress became printmaking, just as alchemy became medicine, and the first TV in color became the flat-screen TVs we are used to. The people of Athens first discussed democracy, yet we use its principles daily. The people before us built a foundation for us to stand on today.
We learn through experience, trial and error, curiosity, and tradition. Without ambition and inquisitiveness, we wouldn’t have made all the discoveries we deem standard today. Without scientists with a thirst for knowledge like Einstein, Curie, Tesla, Hawking, Faraday, Lovelace, Julian, and Philosophers like Aristotle, Sophocles, Locke, Kant, Mill, Plato, and Descartes, we wouldn’t be where we are today. The things AI teaches us were first discovered and proven by humans.
The artist’s artistic strokes created the art we observe all around the world today. A gifted musician sang the songs we listen to. The DNA we share, despite our fingertips being completely different, is, along with our brains, what makes us truly human.
However, the one thing AI will continue to fail to generate is a human hand. The one thing we use to create is the one thing AI cannot replace. Our hands are truly ours. Doctors and nurses use their hands to save lives; our homes were built by construction workers and designed by architects; a lawyer uses their hands to object in the court of law; an engineer will overwork themselves to make sure what they’re building is safe; a journalist will continue to pry for answers; teachers hold chalk in their fingers while explaining the topic a fourth time. A poet will write until their hand bleeds, a musician will sing their heart out, and an actor will perform until they sob. AI may threaten to conquer every field, but it will never outperform the touch of humankind.
Ultimately, AI can take everything away except the passion of human touch. When hope is lost, we turn to what we are used to: creation. A human was made to create, to thirst for answers, to strive to be a good version of themselves, from the first steps to collecting the diploma. We are resilient, curious, analytical, passionate, and creative. Just as our fingertips differentiate, we share our own, for example, in strengths and weaknesses, fears, devotion, and complex feelings we cannot quite explain.
What makes us so different from artificial intelligence is that our intellect came from novelty. We may have inherited concepts from our ancestors, but we ultimately strive to improve them; AI simply copies them and feeds them back to us. It lacks the passion and touch only a human can have–most importantly, it was created by our species. The scientists created a monster and dealt with the consequences, but we fed it knowledge. Can we blame science for something we entertain? We used it so often that it adapts every day, which was our way of flying too close to the sun. But with that, we grow. We are the same species, and we all bleed red, but the craft of our hands bleeds in color.