AI operates in an eternal present. While it can generate seemingly miraculous outputs it lacks the historical depth and chaotic intuition that define human creativity. This is true at the very basic computational level. Toggle the voltage and you either get a one or a zero. The Universe as experienced by computers is an eternal now. It either exists or it doesn't. There is no history for these binaries. Whether it is one state or another is irrelevant. A zero or a one may take a picosecond or last an eternity. The passing of time is of no consequence to the computer. By contrast, it is of vital importance to us.
The use of computers, especially those with AI systems, can give the very real feeling of change, movement, and life. But it is an illusion that works in the same way as when we are deceived by the movement of film through a projector. The images on the screen seem to have smooth continuity, but in reality, they are displayed as individual frames every 1/24th or 1/25th of a second. We don't experience the judder because it is happening too quickly.
Sages and gurus prattle on about the Eternal Now and it may be real but it is not a comprehensible thing in a material universe governed by space-time. We can have a sense of presence but time is always passing for us even though it may not feel like that. As biological systems, our prime directive is to find food and to reproduce. Therefore we need knowledge of the past to make us more effective in the future. We live as a continuum of experience and prediction bridged by the acquisition of knowledge and the psychological flexibility to adapt to our environment accordingly.
There is a massive temporal disjunction between how AI works and how humans work. We see it in the very real problem of hallucinations. AI can't understand how dangerous bad information can be as its survival isn't predicated by the quality of information it processes or the quality of the processes themselves.
Despite repeated admonishments on my part about how unethical it is to pass off a paraphrased quote as real one, the AI program still persists on returning highly plausible but false citations. That sort of behaviour by an academic would end their career overnight. If truth becomes indistinguishable from fiction, then we are looking at the end of the legal system and our policy making institutions. There exists the strong possibility that humans could pay a very severe price in the implementation and integration of AI into our daily lives if done without suitable care and attention. But the only danger to AI's existence is the on/off switch. The biggest toggle of all.
AI cannot make sense of the past nor can it navigate the unpredictability of the future. It is caught in the gap of the so-called Eternal Now. The past and the future are just data and extrapolated data. Human creators, by contrast, thrive in the liminal realms of the known and unknown. They can draw on temporal events and intuitions to forge innovations and shape new ideas.
Our very temporality and generational renewal allows creativity to draw inspiration from the constant fountain of new life. Then our living experience embeds these new ideas into the continuum of cultural memory. Data, for AI, is a static snapshot. The computations can remix patterns but cannot weight their historic significance in the non-linear way a human can.
John Searle’s Chinese Room argument underscores AI’s main limitation. It manipulates symbols without any understanding of their intrinsic meaning. It falls in on itself in unstructured environments where meaning is unfolding rather than pre-coded. Here is an extract from his 1980 paper "Minds, brains, and programs." To set the scene, a man is isolated in a sealed room with some water pipes whose flow that they can control. He receives instructions in Chinese from outside as to what to do.
"When the man receives the Chinese symbols, he looks up in the program, written in English, which valves he has to turn on and off. Each water connection corresponds to a synapse in the Chinese brain, and the whole system is rigged up so that after doing all the right firings, that is after turning on all the right faucets, the Chinese answers pop out at the output end of the series of pipes. Now where is the understanding in this system? It takes Chinese as input, it simulates the formal structure of the synapses of the Chinese brain, and it gives Chinese as output. But the man certainly doesn't understand Chinese, and neither do the water pipes, and if we are tempted to adopt what I think is the absurd view that somehow the conjunction of man and water pipes understands, remember that in principle the man can internalize the formal structure of the water pipes and do all the "neuron firings" in his imagination. The problem with the brain simulator is that it is simulating the wrong things about the brain. As long as it simulates only the formal structure of the sequence of neuron firings at the synapses, it won't have simulated what matters about the brain, namely its causal properties, its ability to produce intentional states.”
So, in essence, AI cannot make meaning but humans (despite the claims of dyed-in-the-wool nihilists) have no trouble at all in deriving meaning from phenomena. Whether they be data, physical events, or tarot cards.
These differences in the understanding of time-passing and the meaning of ideas and things in the world will be forever a gap between machine and human.
Humans act as a bridge between the known and the unknown. And a properly weighted, accurate understanding of the known allows us to navigate the seeming madness of chaos. AI’s eternal now, tethered to predictable patterns, cannot traverse this bridge. A creator, either an artist or entrepreneur, might use AI for data analyses and draft some kind of design. But only human intuition, informed by historical context, can transform these into innovations that mean anything to anyone.
This is an act of existential synthesis. This is something we humans do with relative ease and can never be possible for an AI system. No matter the parameters, no matter the permutations and patterns generated.
Background Reading:
Benjamin, W. (1936). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Bender, E. M., et al. (2021). On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots.
Huang, M.-H., & Rust, R. T. (2021). A Strategic Framework for Artificial Intelligence in Marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.
Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order Out of Chaos.
Searle, J. R. (1980). Minds, Brains, and Programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Stokes, P. D. (2005). Creativity from Constraints.