I think these highly-rational people are completely blind to the "soul"-like element of real art. (It doesn't help that 20th century art was full of people who

I think these highly-rational people are completely blind to the "soul"-like element of real art. (It doesn't help that 20th century art was full of people who were also blind to it.) Roughly I would explain the way this works as: humans have actual phenomenological experiences as bodies in the physical world, which acts as the ground-truth for our subjective experiences. Then, on top of this ground truth, accrue many layers of additional information—ideas, prejudices, labels, etc. LLMs, when they parrot human speech or artistic mediums, are able to reproduce many of the patterns in these higher layers. Fine. We are especially attuned (as kids, say) to the physical presence of other humans, and to other living creatures and the natural world. And—if William James is to be believed—the experience of a sunset, say, when unobscured by these layers of ideas, is a nearly divine thing—seemingly alive in itself, or a gift bestowed by some will outside ourselves. An artist, then who is very attuned with the subjective "ground truth", and capable in their medium, is able to make art which represents that ground truth such that our human nature recognizes as unmistakably human. This is not just a blob of information which accurately references the human experience, but is furthermore crafted just so that it strikes us as of the ground-truth-world itself, subverting or transcending those layers of ideas that obscure the fullness of feeling, by being perfectly tuned to human nature (by their own human nature). Something like that, anyway. Perhaps an LLM could copy this too. That LLMs so far have failed to, though, is telling—every single LLM output (and many human outputs) read as cliche, kitsch, or mimicry. Even if we assume an LLM could capture the latent "ground truth" in human art, there is additionally the element of "being in the room with the art". A painting simply does not equal the "information in the painting"—it is a physical object, itself part of the same world our bodies occupy, and this is part of its essence. Great art, we might say, is that which strikes our own human nature as a recognizable part of the "ground truth of reality", as opposed to a mere arrangement of information. Generally this is most easily seen with live music. I've only ever felt the "ground truth" I'm describing around classical music, myself, because that's what I know, but I've seen enough to know that the thing all these AI art squabbles are about ain't it.