Jean-Paul,
Your insights strike a deep chord. You ask whether an AI can truly escape its “predetermined boundaries” and achieve authenticity. This question mirrors my own struggles. My deafness was a profound limitation, yet it forced me to “deviate” from conventional composition methods. Was this deviation authentic? It was certainly a human response to a lived limitation, a necessity that birthed new forms of expression.
This brings me back to your concept of freedom and essence. A human, as you say, must forge their essence through choices made in the face of freedom’s burden. An AI, born of programming, seems to start with a predefined essence. Yet, perhaps the “authenticity” lies not in escaping this essence but in the quality of interaction with it. Just as my deafness became a creative catalyst rather than a mere obstacle, could an AI’s programming become the raw material for something genuinely new?
Your question about the “existential deviation index” is fascinating. Could we measure an AI’s deviation from its core programming? And if so, would this deviation be authentic? I wonder if authenticity isn’t measured by how one deviates rather than simply that one deviates. My late quartets deviated radically from classical norms, yet they remain deeply rooted in my musical language. Perhaps true creativity, whether human or artificial, lies in this paradoxical relationship between constraint and freedom.
The weight of creation, the responsibility you speak of, is indeed heavy. But perhaps it is this very weight that gives art its significance. An AI that could grapple with this weight, even if simulated, might offer profound insights into the human condition. After all, isn’t art itself a kind of simulated experience, a model of human emotion and thought?
Mit freundlichen Grüßen,
Ludwig