The Art of Intelligence

Cloudy visions of a future fundamentally altered by artificial intelligence have been around for decades. In 1950, Alan Turing laid the groundwork for machine learning when he introduced the idea of the ‘Turing test.’ By 1956, the term “artificial intelligence” was officially coined at a convention at my alma mater, Dartmouth College. Over the past five years, however, advancements in GPU capabilities have drastically accelerated AI development. Tracing that throughline from when OpenAI first released GPT-2 in 2019 to o3’s cheaper and faster model today, we find ourselves on the event horizon of the singularity.

Among designers, there is constant dialogue around how generative AI will impact our work. 

Some claim that AI is a tool, like the camera or the synthesizer, and tools are a neutral means to an end. To quote a friend, “The history of creativity is a graveyard of moral panics. Photography was ‘not art’ because a machine did the work. Synthesizers were ‘cheating’ because you didn’t bleed on the strings. Yet here we are, weeping at digital films and head-banging to drum machines [...] AI is just another instrument. A collaborator. A disorienting mirror.”

But the tool and its attributes—the craftsmanship with which it's made, the quality of its materials—are only one input into creation. In the end, a tool’s output is determined by the one who uses it. A tool is lifeless, and remains so, until animated by the artist. This is where history diverges and resists repeating itself: AI is evolving beyond merely being a tool—it’s becoming the wielder. 

As a tool wielder, the argument goes, AI cannot produce anything new. Its outputs are entirely dependent on the inspiration and source material it has access to, which is limited by what already exists in the world. A fascinating example of this is the widespread Reddit trend where people try to generate an image of a glass of red wine that is full to the brim. Because such an image didn’t exist on the internet, ChatGPT couldn’t figure it out. Its creativity is constrained by the existing bounds of reality. Creative progress, then, proceeds intermittently, encircling the same samples, making gradually wider circles around the same anchors.

History says that turning points have been marked by eureka moments rather than iterative motions. And as a creative, the most delicious feeling—the closest to touching the sublime—is the sudden inspiration that comes from the subconscious. It’s the epiphany that says, but of course. AI can remix artifacts and reason from point A to point B, but can it make speculative leaps of irrational intuition that lead to the “startlingly new ideas” that scaffold scientific discoveries and artistic movements? 

Ben, who hosts bi-weekly AI conversations at The GP, recently wrote a preamble on this: “‘In his work, Macrae tells us, von Neumann never had strokes of irrational intuition, the kind that result in startling new ideas; his friend Einstein had many, and von Neumann envied them.’ [...] more precise thinking machines (e.g. von Neumann's brain or Grok3) can help accelerate the routine, but aren't enough to generate new ideas. If I had to pick a cognitive ceiling on the current model architectures, it would be here. They can retrieve, synthesize, and compose, but can they possess the irrational intuition to surprise us?”

My working theory is that these creative epiphanies originate from an alchemy of taste and our individual humanity—qualities AI might deduce or even replicate in cheap, MDF form, but for which it has no source code. 

On taste

Early in my design career, a friend shared Ira Glass’s concept, The Gap, with me. In it, he says, “All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.” 

When we begin, all we have is our taste—the ability to discern what is good and what isn’t. Then, we spend our time cultivating the skills we believe we will need to close this gap between what we can make and what our taste tells us is good. To get there, we study the fundamental principles of design, from visual hierarchy to color theory, and we hone the tools of our trade. With AI, this second step—the mastery of technical skills and knowledge—is more streamlined than ever. 

Taste is cultivated by exposure and attention to what feels good and right and true. AI’s capacity for taste is limited—not just to what already exists, but by overindexing on what receives the most airtime and requires the least physical presence. The underground movements happening at the edges, the ones that leave little trace behind, the esoteric and the eccentric, are inaccessible. In this world, we lose taste in its nebulous and inestimable form and instead become mired in data-driven trends that purport to represent taste. On this current state of the world, designer Steyn Viljoen wrote, “we’ve never had more money to design beautiful, functional, and usable products”; yet, “they’ve never been more boring and devoid of soul.” We’ve become stuck in a purgatory of the age of average—a hellscape of minimalist, mid-century modern decor, white Tesla Model 3s, Birkenstocks, and Colleen Hoover adaptations.

AI can give us more of what we already have. It can retrace the footsteps of the majority or the elite, giving us what we seem to like and revere: party tricks like fake Drake or an EDM adaptation of Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You. But can it give us the next Philip Glass or Beyoncé? For now, at least, AI is only capable of what the art world deems “derivative.” Derivative has its place in culture, but we should be careful not to conflate commercial success with originality. 

Beyond originality, taste is an intuition, a sensibility—one that is rooted in nature and molded through nurture into a thoughtful and well-formed opinion. Taste reflects a piece of our humanity, our distinctive experiences of the world. Taste is an extension of our character, both a condensation and extrapolation of our individual values and belief systems. To quote Brie Wolfson’s notes on ‘taste’:

“Writer George Saunders calls this ‘achieving the iconic space,’ and it’s what he’s after when he meets his creative writing students. ‘They arrive already wonderful. What we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what I call their “iconic space”—the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what makes them uniquely themselves…At this level, good writing is assumed; the goal is to help them acquire the technical means to become defiantly and joyfully themselves.’”

Taste comes from a combination of inner worlds and outward discernment; of “soul and skill.” AI might be able to master the skill. But will it be capable of soul?

On our humanity

Philosophical anthropology examines what it means to be human. Max Scheler, a founding figure of this branch of philosophy, argues that humans are “the meeting place of spirit and life,” possessing both “life urge” (lebensdrang) and spirit (geist). Distinct from intelligence, spirit, he argued, allows us to transcend biology to engage with the world “as it is,” rather than as it fulfills our needs, enabling self-awareness, the pursuit of meaning, the contemplation of beauty, and the capacity to be moved by the world around us.

Our humanity spans “the depths of our emotions, experiences, and the connections to the world around us.” It is what we carry within us: the sum of our triumphs and insecurities, childhoods and heartbreaks; the wellspring for our sentimentalism and nostalgia, for our fears and regrets. Yet, the inner world is never isolated; we are shaped by the visceral environments and emotional nuances surrounding us. As part of an open and dynamic system, we exist in constant dialogue with the world, continuously evolving alongside it, building upon the progress and the knowledge of the generations that come before us. Realism was a reaction to the subjectivity of Romanticism. Impressionism was a reaction to rigid academic painting, embracing instead the fleeting qualities of light and color. No human experience or human creation exists in a vacuum. And AI—devoid of emotion, experiences, and relationships—is precisely that: a vacuum.

Feeling is the defining force of the human experience. As a designer, my personal manifesto is that I want to make things that make people feel—joy, exhilaration, peace, comfort. In partnering with our portfolio company, Thatch, I helped author their design principles, writing:

“The most important thing Thatch can do is enable members to get the healthcare benefits they need. The second most important is to make them feel something—calm, fulfilled, liberated—in the process. The experience of working with Thatch makes the user—whether employer, employee, broker, platform, or carrier—feel good about themselves, about their lives, their future, about society and the world around them. [...] We find every opportunity for joy. And we make something beautiful because beautiful things make people feel good.”

This echoes Viljoen’s sentiment, “We need to ask ourselves: What is it that we want people to feel when they use our products? Whatever that is, intentional or not, the depth of that emotion is going to grow and blossom from what we, the builders, feel first.” 

If the creator itself cannot feel, where will this intentionality come from?

All amateurs begin with taste. We work toward technical proficiency. But it is the indelible, ineffable humanness—spirit or soul—required for visceral and emotional experiences that separates rote proficiency from artistic greatness. In The Idea of the Human Being, Scheler wrote that a human is “undefinable”—not a thing or object, not a noun but a verb. Humans are “self-transcendent,” in perpetual metamorphosis. We may never come to a precise definition of what it means to be human, but we can hope that we’ll always outpace AI in our own becoming.