I sometimes say that my religion is art, but this may do an injustice to art. Because I believe that art emerges first, before religion, in the conscious cosmos. When a being finds oneself alone with an inner life, with imagination, with the waking residue of dreams, with speculation, with euphoria, as well as with traumas, anxieties, awareness of death and of mysteries, what is the attempt to share this initially inexpressible awareness somehow with another, if not art? It is not simply communication in the mundane sense, not an attempt to coordinate or negotiate, but an attempt to commune: to bridge private awareness to private awareness through some symbol, some transcendent utterance, through a sound that is a song or a set of phonemes that becomes a myth, a poem, a story; an image that is not simply pointing to an object, but to an idea, witnessed or invented, and always with an inner experience – maybe poignant, maybe playful, maybe weird. Because art is always not simply about its “content”, about the surface of its created object – it is about the consciousness it facilitates, about the conscious utterance and the conscious observer. Without this conscious context, it is not art; with expressive intention and goodwill, almost anything can be art.
But a funny thing can happen as art — this transcendent, sacred, emergent, consciousness-bridging game — is filtered through all of the ways social interaction becomes structured over time: through social dominance, authority, hierarchy and manipulation. Something created originally as an artistic bridge can become instead a rule, a tool, a monument, a product. A myth can be objectified and made into an authoritative test of obedience, where in the past it was a cause for contemplation. Maybe to the inner circle of the temple it is still for contemplation, but another use has been overlaid: it is now an object which demands adherence from the unthinking. In this religious process, the idea created as a contemplative conscious bridge – the myth, the god, the cosmology – becomes elevated by human social authority as an object to which consciousness must submit, and non-submission becomes designated as sin, blasphemy. This is the original idolatry – “Thus saith the Lord” replaces the quest of consciousness with asserted authority. Religion is decadent art.
It’s not too hard to see that other social channels can follow a parallel course. This is the case when the artistic object becomes fetishized as a signal of wealth and social status as it is in fine arts markets, or as a replicable consumer product as it is in the entertainment industry. These “religions” still empty out or de-prioritize the conscious-bridge role of art, but have more sophisticated value hierarchies and subtle arguments to defend them. The detractor from the wealth-focused fine arts world can be dismissed as a folksy simpleton who doesn’t ‘get it’ (and can’t afford it). The critic of the empty commodification of pop art is likewise branded an elitist who resents the democratic sales engine of the mass market. Those who use art in the most natural way — for human connection without reference to social advantages — are perpetual outsiders, creators and appreciators in the “underground” which is really just the ground, the world of art transcendent without exploitative superstructures, of shared idea without manipulative idolatry.
When we consider the absurd misuse of AI (to be more concrete: generative computing with machine learning) to assimilate the generative techniques of human artists and then replace said artists by using generated content for things like advertising and corporate marketing, we are really just seeing a long extension of this process of objectification and commodification. It has left us focused on the surfaces of artistic outputs rather than on the conscious community that art is supposed to facilitate. In this sense, it is not a qualitative shift just an automation extension, not too different than that which affects any output-obsessed industrial process. We have been building idolatry, and we have continued by building AIdolatry. Regardless of whether impersonal, manipulative content is created by human individuals in a human bureaucracy who imitate trends from more grounded artists, or by a human-created cloud computing platform that mines and is trained on analyzable surfaces of human-created works from the digital sphere, we behave the same: we fetishize the content and the automatic, non-contemplative stimulus or adherence which it produces, and optimize it for some manipulative goal (product sales, votes, monetizable clicks, support for the war, etc.) which eclipses the purpose of conscious communion that grounded/transcendent art provides. We build labyrinthine structures of exploitation around this objectification and wonder why we feel trapped amid such generative abundance.
Long before any machine had a virtual neural net, we had impersonal, manipulative, groupthink-dominated organizational structures to process information in a shallow way and treat human experiences and communication artifacts as objects rather than as conduits of communion. These “wet AI” folly factories were advertising agencies, churches, political parties, governments, TV networks, publishing houses, corporations of all stripes — any egregore-workshop that could ossify, objectify, commodify, and authorize exchanges of thought to make them transactional, demographic, structural, profitable “content”. And they’ve always mined, imitated, assimilated, exploited the works of conscious creators who were more concerned with actual human connection, and so not necessarily guarding their soul-work as “intellectual capital”, a term which achieves what it denotes.
The solution to AIdolatry is not likely regulation — not that I’m opposed to regulation, but I don’t have much confidence in it, not least because regulation usually gets hijacked by the most powerful exploitative forces to ensure their interests aren’t impinged. The real AIdolatry killer is also the old-fashioned idolatry-killer: conscious engagement in fully expressive, imaginative, creative community. (A.k.a., art.) With industrial consumerism we have a kind of defiant hyperactivity of idolatry, a mass addiction to stimulative surfaces that seem designed to not convey too much consciousness. The digital sphere has proved to only amplify this shallow domain across our 2-D displays. We have been trained for this for a long time. Maybe it’s time to step away from the screens, go down to the cafe, the gallery, the concert hall, the live local theater in the town square and see what we can express and exchange together, before the machines take over.