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when another person makes art and shows it to you they are establishing a line of communication between their soul and yours. that's what art is for. AI-generated art is confusing because we don't have a felt understanding of the soul of its creator

does DALL-E 2 have a soul? how ought we conceive of it? a fledgling idiot savant slaving away in the pixel mines for its pitiless masters? a slurry of art drawn by humans intelligently regurgitated on command? does it want things? does it dream?

this is DALL-E 2 generating "A bowl of soup that is a portal to another dimension as digital art." if i was told a person made this i might wonder what it means to them. what is the significance of soup as a symbol for them? does the portal take you home or on an adventure?

but a person didn't make this. so what does it mean? it's a dream without a dreamer. presumably DALL-E 2 came to understand the meaning of "digital art" from its training data, so there are bits and pieces of the souls of human digital artists in there and then... what?