Salvatore Sanfilippo, known in tech circles as antirez and the creator of Redis, has set out a fairly nuanced position on the creative abilities of artificial intelligence. His point of view is especially interesting because, as well as being an expert programmer, he also writes fiction.
On his account, AI can display remarkable technical competence and combine knowledge drawn from different fields, but it can lack an overall vision of the project: understanding what is actually worth making, and which choices are superfluous.
It is an important distinction: the limit of AI lies not necessarily in producing solutions, but in the ability to establish which solution deserves to be produced. So: AI can technically execute a work, but it is the human being who can establish which work they want to make. Even when the technical execution is entrusted to the machine, the value lies in the choices that steer the production.
Writing, composition and programming share something fundamental: they all employ languages and grammars, and they all require organising interdependent elements. That is why he does not find it surprising that language models are effective in both fields. It is the human being, the author, who establishes what is to be made and what value to pursue: taste, selection and the quality of the choices are what count.
For Sanfilippo, in short, the ability to produce a work and the ability to decide which work deserves to be produced are two distinct problems.
Sanfilippo's observations stop there. It falls to us to consider the role of the artist as a saboteur of socially accepted codes, as a subject aware of playing the part of an actor — through the recovery of imperfection and of specifically human values bound to the refusal of exactness: empathy, suffering, symbolism, abstraction, the dreamlike representation of a subconscious rooted in the most hidden impulses of our soul. Scenarios in which artificial intelligence can play the part of a useful collaborator, but never that of the main subject.
It is along these lines, I believe, that the aesthetic reflection of the new season of digital art should move — principles set out in the concept of Deformalism.