I have always been estranged from the notion that no image or representation should be made of spiritual matters.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth—Exodus 20:4 — King James Version (KJV 1900)
This is particularly strict in Islam, of course, where even representation of the prophet is forbidden. While this gave rise to beautiful calligraphy instead, what a loss to prevent Caravaggio, ..., etc. Attempts at visualising what is beyond our sense and even intellectual reach is the basis of the scientific aspiration, which makes us picture first the atom, then its wavefunction.
With AI, however, I start to understand why such representations are fundamentally diabolical. Bernanos once made this great representation of one's entry to heaven:
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This is an idea which, interestingly, I had independently toyed with, maybe because my father used to tell me that he would always be sad of the little boy I took away from him by growing up. The notion looked ludicrous to me at first but eventually resonated deeply. Each instant is unique. Even places are never the same, as the same one in the past also has lost something: the present took it away from you. Don't you have this feeling? In the fantasy of my imagination, I sometimes get unstuck in time, like Billy Pilgrim, and find myself, almost in an hallucination, back to the football stadium where we used to go with my dad to sight the moon with our toy telescope, or learn to bike, or fire with the lead rifle at paper targets, making sounds like in Westerns when the bullets grazed the sound. Such images are so vivid—precisely as described by Pauwells in Saint Quelqu'un—that I really feel I could enter the scene and say hello. My imagination is not so wild as allow me to interact with the characters, at least when I am awake, so I remain tied to a passive introspection, just like with la invención de Morel. But I could imagine that I'd be allowed to utter a sound that would make the characters, my father, my little brother playing on a corner, and myself, turn round and look at me. What an encounter! Barjavel also described it very neatly in his Voyageur Imprudent.
Now AI went one step further from the above-cited artistic pieces, and there are obviously many more, by rendering in movies such meetings between famous people, old and young. The result is striking, but since it is so realistic and direct, it leaves no room for interpretation, participation or involvement: it makes you a witness of what everybody perceives in its same "apparent" actuality. This is unlike literature which leaves you at the center of the encounter and makes you conceive the whole thing, past the idea itself.
The "Artificial" is robbing you from your active participation. At this stage, since we are not dead yet, the spiritually minded, or religious person, can play with their imagination of how such encountered would take place. But put an AI in this business, and it will show it for you, in ways so convincing and realistic that you do not have to wonder about the interaction itself: it is played in front of your eyes as if it would involve any two other actors. There is no real complicity or tenderness between the old and young Clint Eastwoods: this is faked by the machine. There is no display of embarrassed virility between the old and young Mel Gibsons. It is all faked. Again, I believe the proper term is "Fake Intelligence".
The problem is, it is all fake. It is based on
So reading Bernanos making such a trumpeting impression of one's entry to heaven