I Am Not a Machine. Yes You Are.

I’m trying to explain to Arthur I. Miller why artworks generated by computers don’t quite do it for me. There’s no human being behind them. The works aren’t a portal into another person’s mind, where you can wander in a warren of intention, emotion, and perception, feeling life being shaped into form. What’s more, it often seems, people just ain’t no good, so it’s transcendent to be reminded they can be. Art is one of the few human creations that can do that. Machine art never can because it’s not, well, human. No matter how engaging the songs or poems that a computer generates may be, they ultimately feel empty. They lack the electricity of the human body, the hum of human consciousness, the connection with another person. Miller, a longtime professor, a gentleman intellect, dressed in casual black, is listening patiently, letting me have my say. But I can tell he’s thinking, “This guy’s living in the past.”

Miller is sitting at a simple table in a dim and sparsely furnished apartment on New York City’s Lower East Side. It’s an Airbnb place that’s keeping him housed while he gives talks in bookstores and colleges in the city about his latest book, The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity. Miller is the Virgil of art and science writing, a guide through the underworld of artists employing scientific practices like gene-splicing, brain imaging, and computer-code writing to create works that ask viewers to reflect on how science and technology are changing our views of the world and everything in it, including us. His previous book, Colliding Worlds, features artists like Austrian sculptor Julian Voss-Andreae, who studied quantum physics. One Voss-Andreae work, Quantum Man, stands eight feet tall and is constructed of more than 100 vertical steel sheets. The sculpture looks like a man when seen from the front, but as viewers move around it, the figure vanishes, representing how experiments in quantum physics, depending how they’re set up, detect electrons as either waves or particles: “how you look at it, that’s what it is,” writes Miller.