To live is to feel, namely to interiorise or, even better, to sensibly borrow somebody’s personal occurrences and redesign their boundaries to more closely resemble one’s own spirit and way of perceiving. A living being adheres, perhaps unconsciously, to a policy of self-affirmation that is elicited through subtle gestures, as that of uttering a word of cacophonous disagreement within the quietness of an intellectually static orchestra; or, on a similar note, people externalise their need to be someone within a sea of looking-to-be someone-s by engaging in a competition with others, perhaps driven by an inner instinct to release outwards instead of forcing inward enclosure. Human rationality thus appears as a disillusioned dream, that is substituted by the emotional fabric of one’s internal universe. People are, indeed, able to both receive and produce feelings, as if the latter were to be the tangible representations of their thoughts, and could be caressed by the palm of one’s hand. Existing may thus mean to embrace the novelty of what is yet to be known fully, perhaps requiring the ability to stay as humble as foolish towards the future, which is yet to be defined and could be successfully shaped starting from the recognition of emotions as the artistic development of one’s inner soul.
One of the possible paths leading towards a better personal knowledge is to look within oneself, in order to let go of any repressed feeling (even remotely perceived emotion) that might impair from taking over one’s life proactively. Over the course of time, and as biologic growth plays its part effectively in order to be complemented by intellectual maturity later on, the individual approaches subconsciously the realm of creativity applied to their spheres of interests; that same creativity is the one fostering the production of ideas and igniting a fire of innovation within people’s minds. At that point, once the principle of self-preservation is being substituted by the need to be better, that very sense of individual enhancement starts being enacted upon, motivated by the reassurance that others may be going through experiences similar to the ones conceived as strictly personal. A similar release of emotions, born as the reactionary instinct to give to the external world a bit of human self, may not come under the form of neither verbal nor written words; indeed, humans have come to learn, since prehistorical times, that their ideas could be better conveyed by artistic representations.
Where the word finds a barrier of intimidation right when it should be pronounced, the colour of a painting brush, the point of a pencil or even the precision of a scalpel offer their help in translating unexpressed emotions into artistic concreteness. There comes the title of artist, who is exactly the one being that cannot move forward without first emancipating themselves from the immobility of their life and, for doing so, finds in the artistic path the light shining at the end of the tunnel of their uncertainties. But human progress isn’t always kind towards art; as humans find a way to be better with and for themselves, there it comes the need to follow the wind of evolution that allows for progress, but may prove noxious towards that hardly gained intellectual creativity that makes individuals human before them acting as existing beings.
Contemporary societies are experiencing the effects of moving towards innovation, which now elevates Artificial Intelligence as the milestone of a new era of technological development, that should be aimed at the betterment of life quality. As any disruptive technology that starts being an integral part of humans’ lives, AI has been crafted by the people of the world with the side effect of producing other mentalities that cannot distinguish between the notions of existing and living; where existing means to be given the power of thought in order to complete tasks sterilely, carrying on day after day, the act of living entails a wider range of perceptions that have as their necessary prelude the presence of an interior life, rich of almost unintelligible emotions. That lacks AI, which (or, perhaps, who) is still asked by emotion-carrying humans to write texts, organise thoughts, and even plot ideas under the form of visual representations of any sort.
The moment humans feel represented by AI-crafted artistic frames, the power of personal perceptions starts featuring a very controversial meaning to it: what if art itself were unilateral, thus not requiring a living artist to translate their emotions into visual concreteness in order to make the spectator live another emotion, similar or radically different? What if AI could speak to the realm of feelings as a form of pity towards its technological unbiasedness, that is not able to smile, or cry, or get angry at the world, but is capable of analysing it with automatic indifference? Art may become a construction, or could more significantly establish a bridge of communication between machines and human beings. Under this perspective, humans may even find themselves at disadvantage in the moment they get emotional at the artistic product of “emotionless technology”, as they are not being able to reward the latter for their own sentimental experience. Although artistic expression doesn’t require the sender nor the recipient of a work of art to be seeing each other, face to face, still their communication is implicit and can happen through feelings that the author senses within themselves, and knows will instil into somebody else’s interiority. In the case of AI, that exchange has no place to happen; the mechanical components within an unprecedentedly human-like piece of machinery will produce a work of art without feeling any type of way towards it, and might still obtain to craft a greater work than the intended one in the very moment an emotion touches the mind and reaches the heart of the person who witnesses it.
One of the less acknowledged and still more powerful means of human expression, namely art, may be at risk of extinction; an extinction that ranges from art being a humanly driven activity, to it becoming the domain of a robot which doesn’t know emotions, but can reproduce them as if they were made of the same matter making up the cellar structures of living individuals. A similar logic leads to question the truthfulness of emotions. Are feelings real? Or should they be seen as the fictitious product of an overly creative intellect, thus having an index of replicability higher than possibly imaginable? If that were to be the case, art will need to adapt and evolve in the direction of a seemingly bilateral exchange between people and inhuman machines. Perhaps, humans will find the way to apply their artistic intelligence to the better development of AI connotations, which may not live of emotions but could be indirectly exposed to them during their structural crafting process. Because people are on the world to live of the beauty of change, redirection, discontinuity and possibilities, all going through their feelings, the latter need to be protected as the gem of that more hardly explorable universe of abstract interiority.
Thus, art seems to keep living in an era of AI-driven advancement, although it is still subject to evolution and may tend to become an experience no more based on emotional exchange, but on the artificial crafting of feelings that are unapologetically felt by diverse people. It will then be a question of humanly decisions whether to embrace the artistic capacity of AI, or to keep advocating for the human crafting of human emotions, as it has always been since the very beginnings of life on Earth. Humans being emotional creatures, their nature almost forces them not to hide behind their perceptions, but to make them explicit instead; in these terms, innovation is driven by that same creativity that has been insofar used to elaborate more advanced models of AI which, despite its inhuman composition, can still be called the result of that emotional instinct that guides the whole humanity towards progress. A progress made by humans for humans or, according to the current evolutionary scenario, made by humans for challenging their ability to create thoughts from lifeless components which, in turn, are being enlivened by the artificial construction of intellectual fervour.
