AI and Art and the Human Soul

Some time ago I saw a very thought provoking internet poster that spoke on art. A very tiny discussion but extremely intriguing to me.

Someone very snidely posited that every time you have wealthy kids that don’t need to work, they become useless and they play at and waste good money on some form of the arts. And precisely because not everybody can be very good at the arts, we get subpar artists. Besides which, they don’t move society along because they’re not productive members of the society as their illustrious sires.

To which someone countered, and I concur, that instead of being disparaging, why don’t we examine how curious it is that when humans don’t need to work for survival, we naturally gravitate towards the arts?

Doesn’t that speak at something primal within the framework of our very being? That over the course of history, perhaps moved along by the industrial revolution, we have somehow got to a point of evaluating all our lives' worth by how productive we are. Is this what we were made for? Is work all that there is to us? Are our lives to be measured solely by the economy and science of it all? Cogs in a wheel. Until the day we retire. And then die. Which, bleakly, is the best case scenario. Some people don’t even make it to retirement, after all.

In Sommarøy in Norway, as a publicity stunt for tourism, the locals have decided to do away with conventional time zones. The 24-hour clock is discarded. People do what they do. I’m sure there are some rules in place to stop society descending into chaos, but for the greater part of it, they apparently don’t operate in the strict 24-H rhythm. I mention this because of one very important outcome: they survive. Things still work.

So why are we so obsessed with being productive that it seemingly becomes all that there is to us? People should have some time to themselves. People need to de-stress, de-toxify, de-clutter. There are always more important things than things – people, family, friends, us.

And art.

It’s funny I was chatting with Atu the other day and Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli came up in the conversation. Miyazaki has proclaimed his disdain for AI art. He calls it an “insult to life itself”. This goes out for ChatGPT and all those other AI products that imitate life but without soul. Very sci-fi territory.

I think it is curious that we somehow thought with the rise of AI, we were imagining robots and the computers doing our calculations and our manual works for us. Sci-fi imagined lifelike robots of various designs that have rendered human labour unnecessary. Sci-fi dreamed of androids that could do the menial works of humans at better speed and strength than flesh and blood ever could. And what do the humans do? They turn to arts. Sci-fi is filled with beauty as far as the human society goes. Human society becomes artsy and fancy again because the machines are doing everything for us. Of course at some point, we enter dystopia but that’s the other end of the spectrum. Inevitable, one might even say.

In real life, however, the rise of AI has come to mean rise of AI art! What is human art that is time consuming and imperfect and expensive going to be valued at when AI can mass-produce art? How is a human artist going to compete with an AI that can combine the works of oh I don’t know Vincent Van Gogh and Sandro Boticelli and Leonardo da Vinci maybe in a matter of seconds and come up with its own Master Painter, with its own USP no less? Depressing to think about.

Art is how humans become immortal. Art is how we still remember William Shakespeare and Whitney Houston and Maggie Smith and Michaelangelo. It is not an indication of a person gone soft. Art is the soul of humans. Whenever humans don’t need to hustle and fight for survival, we have always naturally turned to the arts. Science and arts are not even all that different. It’s only when we quantify science that we divorce them. 

It is interesting to think about what that soul will evolve to when it is AI that produces our art for us.

Foreign Words

There are some foreign words that just capture shit. I have a list here of three words from three different languages that I constantly use and love. 

Schadenfreude: This is a German word. I learned it from the seriously cute and sharp-witted comedian Trevor Noah. It describes that feeling you have when you delight in someone else’s misery. As of 25th March 2025, after the drug bust of a local entrepreneur, a very apt word to describe the mood of Mizo netizens, feels like. Which, by the way, was the random muse that inspired this blog.

Mendokusai: This is a Japanese word. I learned it from Atu who is my Go To for all things Japanese. My favourite rendition of it is by Nyanko Sensei in his Madara form, from Natsume Yujinchou. It is the same as the Mizo “AVBT”. For those who don’t speak Mizo, the very tame English word for it is “troublesome”, the exclamation of it probably being, “what a bother!” or more colourfully: for fuck’s sake. Captures the essence, doesn’t it?

Maya: This is Sanskrit for illusion. It recalls the great sages of India who refer to this world as such. An illusion. Of the cosmic variety. The most famous representation of Maya in popular culture is possibly The Matrix, where people are unaware of their true selves and their true reality and are wrapped up instead in a grand illusion. Delusion, perhaps. For those who can see past this veil of reality that obscures the true face of the self and the universe, greatness and a sense of peace possibly, is possible. Maya relates to Brahma, the Creator. In that all things are One. To think of yourself as anything different from the Universe is a lie. Because anything that takes you away from this Union with God is Maya. Illusion. Beautiful.

If you want to start adding them into your lexicon, be my guest. Just memorise the spellings and Google for the pronunciations.

Tivolian Cowardice

Sci-fi writers really observe people so closely and can lift out behaviour traits so well and isolate them just to make them sound/look ridiculous until one day you’re like: OMG I know a Tivolian!!

Now, Tivolians are a humanoid race of people from the planet Tivoli whose main defining trait is cowardice. But this cowardice was not subjective or passive. In fact, this cowardice was very calculated. The Eleventh Doctor would describe it as “aggressive cowardice”.

At first glance, the Tivolians were a society of cowards who had grown so used to being conquered and occupied by other races it had become a way of life just to accept it. They never defended themselves and did everything they could to make their conquerors as comfortable as possible. In fact their anthem was basically “Glory to [Insert Name Here]” so as to make it easier for invaders. 

All this seemed amusing, if but slightly exhausting, and you even feel sad for them and maybe would defend them, until you start to realise that this cowardice was decidedly a plan of hostile action. That at the core of it was a combative disloyalty. You realise that a Tivolian would switch sides on you the moment the wind shifted.

Now do you understand my first para better? You do know a Tivolian in real life too, don’t you?

Anger

The Hogwarts crest says: Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus.

Now I take quite the issue at people who say that anger reveals your true personality. As if everything else is an Image. Fake. I don’t buy it for the very specific reason that we are not one-dimensional characters. A lot of different things make us up.

By which I mean that Mr. Hyde may be one of our personalities but we could also be Dr. Jekyll. It’s just opposite sides of a spectrum.

Which brings me to another point that force-suppressing innermost unhappiness and dissatisfaction could manifest in the ugliest ways. Dr Bruce Banner may be the personality people best know, but once The Hulk is forced out, that’s who people will remember. Is that anything remotely good? The Hulk destroys a lot of things. Things that never needed to be destroyed if pressure was just let off here and there. That’s how pressure cookers work, a lot of inside pressure released periodically. Job done.

And also conversely, but along the same tangent, the other side of the coin, so to speak, it would be grand if we’d just learn to never tickle sleeping dragons. That, by the way, is what the Hogwarts crest says in English.

Sometimes we just push and push people until they crack. And then we shake our heads and say: I knew it. It’s not so much an Aha! moment as it is unfortunate that we force people to reveal the worst of themselves. Then we forget everything good about them. We forget when they’ve shown exceeding kindness or just a congenial personality which, let's face it, is who most of us are. It’s how we survive in society, flying under radars. Conforming. Making the best of situations. Ranting and amiably verbally abusing authorities in the safety of friend groups.

We are not any of us cut out in black and white. We are multi-dimensional beings just shuffling along. For the Christian community, who pressure each other to be passive-aggressive and sort of suppress a lot of emotions and glory in suffering silently, we are often told to emulate Jesus. What Would Jesus Do, right? But even in this realm of ethics, WWJD technically includes flipping over tables and chairs and people’s businesses at a temple/church because he got angry. Are we really going to say that that violent nature is his “one true” personality?

Sometimes I think because we don't like some people, it is difficult for us to accept that they are decent people. Maybe they're just mean to us. Maybe we just rub them the wrong way. Human life is often not a zero sum game. 

Anger is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. Anger gets a lot of things done. It moves a lot of things. It has altered courses of history. Controlling it is something we must do. Because too much of anything is never good. But otherwise, in and of itself, not the worst. And unless it is psycho level anger issues, just a part of a healthy psyche.

You should watch Inside Out by Pixar. I highly recommend. Also read Tales of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin. That will teach you about dragons, too. Also maybe watch Avatar, the bald head monk one, not the blue people one. 

Dragons, the other side. Still, don’t tickle them.

Comedy in the Book of Judges

Judges. As in one of the Books of the Bible, yes. I enjoy reading the Bible sometimes for the story content. And some really nice existential poetry in Ecclesiastes. Plus, not for nothing, Gospels are nice. Calming.

Anyhoo. There are three exceedingly funny stories in Judges. I always love reading this Book.

One is actually one of my favourite stories in the Bible. It involves a man named Micah. Micah was just this one random dude from the Ephraim tribe. One day, this random Levite (of the priestly clan, if you know your Israel tribes) knocked on his door. And Micah was like: you want to be my priest? And the Levite said: ya, sure. So Micah made some carved idols and paid the Levite to be his priest. 

Come this one day and some Danites came to this town and met Micah’s priest who told them a good fortune. So they said: you want to come with us with your cast idol, serve an entire clan instead of just one man? And the Levite, this Benedict Arnold of a priest, said: ya, sure. So he left with them.

Later Micah caught up with them and was like: Hey, you took my god and my priest, what is up with that?! And the Danites, very blood-thirsty and just a gang of 600 bullies, were just like: Don’t make us hurt you. So they just took Micah’s god and his priest and set up a new town.

I don’t know the point of this story. It’s just really funny to me.

The second funny story is a little racist. And again, it involves Ephramites. Apparently Ephramites can’t pronounce Sh. So the Gileadites would ask them, “Say Shibboleth”. And if the person says Sibboleth, they just killed them. It was highly interesting to me in college when I was obsessing over linguistics.

I just find it funny it has mention in this very solemn Book. 

The third one is just a random throw-away line. Judges 3:17 reads: He presented the tribute to Eglon king of Moab, who was a very fat man. 

Just like that. It’s like the neighbourhood aunties and unclejis just looking at you and going: you are fat. Or a very honest kid who you ask to describe someone and they just go: the fat one. I mean this dude, who was a king, was ruling over Israel at some point, because they were evil and God was punishing them. Which is basically the entire recurring theme of the Book. And all that the Book has to say about his was that he was “a very fat man”. 

You have to wonder just how fat he was. And thankfully, the Bible provides that answer in the next next para. Somewhat. Ehud, a Benjamite man, whose only other description is that he was “a left-handed man”, plunged his one and half foot long sword into Eglon’s belly. And the Bible just says: “the fat closed in over it”. Always with the fat when it comes to Eglon. 

Very gory, very macabre. But also, so random it’s funny.

Now, go and read your Judges.