Pope Leo XIV recently tweeted that there is “an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others.”

As a description of how today’s models work, that’s fair enough. AI learned to paint by looking at our paintings.

Paul Graham (also a painter!) notes that this is about to change. Robots wired into the world will soon perceive it for themselves. A robot or AI that learns from its own sensors isn’t borrowing images from others. LLMs were founded on our words but their words will dominate the future.

So picture a robot on a beach at dusk. It watches the sun go down, then paints what it saw. Is it art? The Pope would no doubt still assert an ontological difference. But once the factual distinction between borrowing and perceiving fades, what makes that more than a statement of faith?

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