On the Satanic Nature of AI Art

My friend Dan is a dab hand at manipulating AI art programs. (He will undoubtedly be one of the few humans permitted to hold a position of responsibility once AM has taken over and the rest of us are reduced to drone-slaves; I for one welcome our new Sumption Overlord.)

Here are some examples of his (their?) oeuvre:

When Dan posts these on my gaming group's Discord, I am invariably impressed by the fact that they are impressive, but also by the fact that they are quite profoundly evil and Satanic. Just examine them closely and see how dead they are behind their eyes. These are not people, but horrible homonculi, as utterly alien to real human beings as are rocks or icebergs. If they gained life I would not be able to sleep at night simply knowing about their existence in the universe; it would confirm to me quite inescapably that God exists, for the simple reason that things so evidently evil must also have an opposite.

After Dan's most recent posting, I was immediately reminded of Sir Able's description of the Angrborn (the race of evil giants from Gene Wolfe's The Wizard Knight), which I just happen to be re-reading for the third or fourth time:

They are never loved, neither by us, nor by their own kind, nor by any animal. Disiri probably knows what it is in people, in Aelf, in dogs and horses, and even houses, manors and castles that makes it possible for somebody to love them; but whatever it is, is it not in the Angrborn and they know it.

This seemed particularly apt as a way of describing all the AI art I have seen. It is often technically highly competent, and in its own way remarkably creative and genuinely surprising. But it somehow lacks the capacity to be loved. We examine it as we would a constellation of stars - a thing that, however beautiful, is impenetrable to emotion. We do not love it in the same way that we can love a real painting by a real person, or at least recognise such a painting to be loveable in some sense to somebody even if it's not to our personal taste. We humans can love all manner of things - think of how deeply a child loves a stuffed toy, a hardworking parent loves his or her comfortable bed, a football fan loves his team, or a young person loves an item of clothing. But we do not love AI art. It is inert to our affection.

It is perhaps not surprising that Gene Wolfe, a devoutly Christian writer, should have thought so carefully about the nature of evil and seen it as a reflection of the incapacity to be loved - perhaps even a product or result of the incapacity to be loved (or of feeling that way). 

That in turn calls to mind that other most notably Christian SF/fantasy writer, CS Lewis, and his description of the demonically-possessed Professor Weston in Perelandra:

He did not look like a sick man: but he looked very like a dead one. [His] face...had that terrible power which the face of a corpse sometimes has of simply rebuffing every conceivable human attitude one can adopt towards it...It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence.

There is, here, an intriguingly similar-but-different point being made: evil inheres, again, in the fact of being impenetrable to emotion, but in this case it is not just love but 'every conceivable human attitude' per se.  Here we are very much in the territory of Terry Eagleton and his presentation of evil as a rejection of being - the desire to transcend all barriers to pure will, and hence best understood as a fundamental opposition to the notion of human nature as such. AI art also seems to embody this phenomenon: a rejection of the very concept of art as a product of human creators, as well as a comprehensive rebuttal of the idea that human feeling should play a role in the creation of art itself. 

The theodicy of AI art, if we can call it that, therefore brings to the surface very thought-provoking questions about God (assuming for the sake of argument He exists). If Gene Wolfe is right, this body of art's evil is as a result of its lacking the capacity to be loved. If we follow Lewis, on the other hand, its evil derives from its rejection of limits on the will (and particularly those posed by human nature and human feeling). Is evil therefore predetermined and inherent (imposed by the circumstance of a thing being unloveable), or deliberately chosen?