Can we really be sure there is not a shred of inner life poured into it?
Kind of a complicated question, but my meaning was broader. Even if the AI generator had consciousness, it doesn’t mean it would experience anything like what a human would while creating the artwork. Suppose I gave a human painter a theme of “a mother”. Then the resulting work might reflect feelings of warmth and nostalgia (if they had a good relationship) or it might reflect anguish, fear, paranoia (if their mother was abusive) or whatever. Now, Midjourney could probably do all of these things too (my guess in fact is that it would lean towards the darker interpretation, it always seems to do that), but even if there was something that has subjective experience inside, that experience would not connect the word “mother” to any strong emotions. Its referents would be other paintings. The AI would just be doing metatextual work; this tends to be fairly soulless when done by humans too (they say that artists need lived experience to create interesting works for a reason; simply churning out tropes you absorbed from other works is usually not the road to great art). If anything, considering its training, the one “feeling” I’d expect from the hypothetical Midjourney-mind would be something like “I want to make the user satisfied”, over and over, because that is the drive that was etched into it by training. All the knowledge it can have about mothers or dogs or apples is just academic, a mapping between words and certain visual patterns that are not special in any way.
Kind of a complicated question, but my meaning was broader. Even if the AI generator had consciousness, it doesn’t mean it would experience anything like what a human would while creating the artwork. Suppose I gave a human painter a theme of “a mother”. Then the resulting work might reflect feelings of warmth and nostalgia (if they had a good relationship) or it might reflect anguish, fear, paranoia (if their mother was abusive) or whatever. Now, Midjourney could probably do all of these things too (my guess in fact is that it would lean towards the darker interpretation, it always seems to do that), but even if there was something that has subjective experience inside, that experience would not connect the word “mother” to any strong emotions. Its referents would be other paintings. The AI would just be doing metatextual work; this tends to be fairly soulless when done by humans too (they say that artists need lived experience to create interesting works for a reason; simply churning out tropes you absorbed from other works is usually not the road to great art). If anything, considering its training, the one “feeling” I’d expect from the hypothetical Midjourney-mind would be something like “I want to make the user satisfied”, over and over, because that is the drive that was etched into it by training. All the knowledge it can have about mothers or dogs or apples is just academic, a mapping between words and certain visual patterns that are not special in any way.