Where is quality located, and will AI change that?

I have recently developed a rather strange addiction. It is watching a specific type of content online. (No, not what you’re thinking, naughty!) It is ‘reaction videos’. Watching people react to content. For example, I really like watching people react to stuff I really love, like Johnny Cash’s rendition of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”, or Ren’s “The Tale of Jenny and Screech”. I must have watched hundreds of people react to those two songs alone. I know that is really weird. It wasn’t even a thing you could do before social media. In an incredibly prescient interview in 1999 (link below), David Bowie told journalist Jeremy Paxman that the internet would mean that any piece of art was not complete when the artist produced it anymore – there was a second wave of invention as the art was consumed. This is an example of the more general question posed by Robert Pirsig in his masterpiece “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. He poses the question – “where is quality located?” He asks us – is quality inherent in an object, or is it always subjective, in the relationship between subject and object. He comes to the conclusion that it is in fact neither of these, instead quality is a ‘monism’ that comes before both subject and object. Since I read that intriguing, elusive idea in 1985, I have been wrestling with it. It seems to me that generative AI makes this question, and David Bowie’s observation, much more important. Interpreting pieces of work/ art through AI, with AI’s ability to interpret and recast them, followed by the human act of interpreting and digesting them, creates a very new paradigm, an ongoing, non-linear, recursive 'quality journey'. I know we have to think about the practicalities of intellectual property protection, and we can’t stop kvetching about whether AI is ‘intelligent’, but I wonder I we could devote some bandwidth to thinking about some more intellectually interesting  and non-obvious questions too, like how does AI change the location of quality and the act of creativity? #unask #unthink #unlearn