A comment on thelovethatlovesyouback_pod: Ep 26, Outsourcing Humanity to AI
Dear Valerie and Jonathan
Thank you for the podcast, which I enjoyed as usual. Valerie’s “two baskets” of thought in relation to consciousness and AI was interesting. Focussing on the idea of a consciousness that predates humanity certainly changes the manner in which we consider our relationship to the phenomenon. I was also delighted by the AI critique of Guston and Cézanne; it was predictable and weirdly comforting in the revelation of its limitations and perception of human aesthetic, subject, context and particularly in regard to Guston, and to what was described by the “machine” (and perhaps to those less familiar with the paradigms of western art), as “bad”.
One particular thread of discussion caught my attention, and I wanted to respond to that with a thought, whatever it’s worth. Despite my attempt at brevity, it was still too long for an IG comment, so I have placed it here, in the hope that it may be spotted at some point.
Jonathan says mid discussion (1): “I was standing in front of Leonardo’s drawings recently, and I would say that’s the closest I’ve ever come to an artwork that felt like a direct download from Essence. Because of the perfection, I guess… it’s as if he’s making notes at the very highest level of the sublime.” Valerie picks up the thread, commenting “The other thing that I was thinking about when you were talking about it is, they talk about the way Mozart wrote music. He wrote it clean, free hand without any corrections. It was pure download.” It is hardly the meat of the discussion, and of course in the context of a (presumably unscripted) discussion. My thoughts are simply that, thoughts that lead to a point below, and not intended as a challenge to what I have already described as an enjoyable, short, discussion.
I struggle with the idea of the artist as someone with special insight to some sort of higher realm, or that The Artist is somehow built differently and sees the world in some exclusive privileged way. That is not to say that certain people don’t look harder, see more or are willing to be open to the world in ways that others are not. Nor is it to imply that there is no such thing as inspiration, or talent (however that may be defined). Rather, it is the idea that certain individuals have access to strata of insight that others do not, and that they effortlessly transcribe these visions, like religious scribes recording revealed texts. But the references to the “downloading” of Leonardo and Mozart from this higher place seem to tap into that idea.
In his wonderful book Music: A Very Short Introduction (2), Nicholas Cook traces versions of this idea through the history of Western music, culminating in the nineteenth-century cult of genius surrounding figures such as Beethoven. Alongside this sits the familiar contrast between Beethoven and Mozart: Beethoven’s notebooks revealing revisions, corrections and struggle, while Mozart’s music supposedly arrived fully formed through some sort of divine inspiration. Yet there is now substantial scholarship showing that this was not the case. Mozart’s compositions, too, emerged through a process of sketches, corrections and adjustments (3), somewhat reassuring for the rest of us (not that we would ever hope to reach anywhere near their extraordinary accomplishments). While the idea of effortless inspiration is an appealing one, and supports the mythology of the genius artist, it seems more at home in myth than in history.
No mention is made about which specific drawings Jonathan was referring to, but the idea of them being perfect, whatever that might mean, or somehow downloaded from a divine or unconscious realm, is curious. Many of Leonardo’s surviving notebooks and preparatory studies are full of revisions, corrections and alternative possibilities. One of the most fascinating aspects of these works is that we can see the mind of the artist working through challenges, leaving behind a record of decision-making in action. The drawings are often not fully resolved, frequently presenting different possibilities, and perhaps that very uncertainty forms part of their intrigue.
So here is my point: in thinking about the relationship between art, the artist and AI, it is far more interesting to imagine the artist engaged with the world, wrestling with their work, hacking away, revising and trying to discover an expression for a perhaps only partly-formed idea lurking in the back of their mind, than it is to imagine them receiving some form of revelation from a higher realm. The machine in relation to a conduit of divine inspiration is far less interesting than the machine in relation to a human being who is fundamentally flawed, uncertain, and engaged in the continual process of aesthetic judgement.
Greg Shaw,
June 2026, Harare.
Notes:
- Freemantle, J and Valerie Kabov, 2026. thelovethatlovesyou back_pod: “Outsourcing Humanity: The AI Conversation | Episode 26”.
- Cook, N. 1998. Music: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford.
- See for example, Ulrich Konrad, “Mozart’s Sketches”, Early Music, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1992).
Greg Shaw 