AI-generated culture: Humans, the rational error being

In addition to fascination, the rapid development of AI is also accompanied by increasing unease. The AI ​​giants didn't have to come and warn against this - and therefore themselves - with dramatic appeals. The discomfort was already there.

Even before the maximum possibility of human extinction, there are developments that make us uncomfortable. For example, the rapid penetration of AI into art, into the entire so-called “creative sector”. That's amazing. And terrifying. Because it was exactly this area that was thought to be immune from this.

But now there is a real flood of AI videos, AI books, and AI music. There are robot orchestras. AI bands. AI compositions. They may still be clumsy, but soon they will grasp, seize.

Before you develop apocalyptic feelings too quickly, you have to point out something - namely what makes this possible: Long before AI, there was already mass production of so-called cultural goods that function according to formula F, from daily soaps to so-called popcorn cinema, from completely reduced genre literature to completely arbitrary pop music. A uniformity that has already anticipated its mechanical reproducibility. As early as 1947, the philosophers Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer denounced such mass production of films, music and books according to rigid patterns as a “culture industry”.

In this respect, it is not surprising that AI-generated products are becoming more and more similar to so-called creative products. This increasing indistinguishability makes it necessary to identify the former: through digital watermarks.

But such digital signatures are not enough. Because people's narcissistic injuries run much deeper. If creativity can already be produced artificially, how can what is genuinely human be saved? Precisely because one recognizes artificiality less and less, precisely because the differences to the human product are becoming smaller and smaller, people look everywhere for the “real” difference. But what does it consist of?

The answers are pretty consensual: in the imperfect. In the deviations. In hesitation. In the weaknesses. In the instinctual.

For an actor, just sweating becomes a sign of humanity. In literature, the subplots, the deviations, the morally ambiguous characters are supposed to guarantee the human element.

A whole bar of lack and failure becomes the last bastion of humanity. The error becomes its seal of approval. Their shortcomings become humanity's defense strategy. The authentic, the real, the human peculiarity now lies in the error: man - the error being. This should be our difference to AI. The error is intended to secure the space for genuinely human creativity - far beyond the purely external watermarks.

But before we ennoble our failure and see scarcity as our last resort, we should perhaps remember once again: If AI reproduces “creativity” mechanically, then it only reproduces standardization. Even if these are constantly being refined, it remains what is called intellectual activity: the production of the calculable. This always remains mere reproduction. AI can actually do this better.

But imperfection doesn't save us from that. Because even the faulty intellectual activity remains limited to this. Reduces people to it. Stay within this framework.

The other of AI, the counter-image, is rather what goes beyond it: reason. The fact that we are rational beings makes the difference. That we can set principles and act according to ideas – beyond what is given.

The threat is not that AI will take our place, but that we will forget to use our reason. Without their use, however, people will rightly become obsolete. Then he becomes what is now threatening: an antiquated creature.