Was talking to a teen about ai art yesterday and she said that ai would be able to make ‘better’ art. So I asked, what exactly is ‘better’ art and how would that work? To which she had an answer: ‘if we manage to understand and replicate the mechanism of human creativity, ai will be able to perfect it’. Which is, I think, what lies at the center of this discourse between businessmen and IT specialists (people generally very far away from creating art) and artists. They think that it is, like anything else, a mechanism. A system, like that of a computer. Instead of, you know (and every artist knows), a completely mysterious and unexplored source of passion and inspiration turning itself into something that has never existed before. Instead of a piece of the divine in the human soul. Instead of the equivalency of a dam being opened and your grief and love spilling out onto paper. They think creativity works like mathematics when creativity actually works like prayer. And AI can’t really pray, can it.