Argument: AI lacks imagination
A commitment to writing asks for more
When I left my last full-time job in Montreal, I set myself up to receive alerts from various online recruiting platforms. Occasionally I still glance at the emails out of curiosity for what’s going on in the workforce. One of the most striking developments over these four years is the growing number of job openings that target writers like me, not to do the job of writing, per se, but to help train Artificial Intelligence (AI) software applications.
As a tool for language processing that is rapidly increasing in sophistication, AI has the potential to wipe out the career prospects of thousands of people in creative industries. On the other hand, there is also something rather reductive about AI. For all its sophistication, the “artificial” component cannot help but create a simplified—even bastardized—version of human intelligence.
A while back, Sam Kriss wrote quite confidently: “AI will not replace human artists, because there’s nothing it can do that human artists can’t.” I am convinced that he’s correct but to say so I am relying on intuition, maybe even faith. I’ve started to wonder whether asserting the human ability to do things AI cannot is, in fact, one of the key tasks of our era.
One of the key faculties that still distinguishes humans from AI is the imagination. It is incumbent on us not to be fooled and seduced by the products generated by AI’s false imagination.
When I enter “AI” and “imagination” into Google, the first result is an AI company called Imagination. The company describes itself with the characteristic humourlessness and charmlessness of our era: “At Imagination, we solve complex problems by creating innovative technologies that help our partners to succeed.” I don’t think the actual human faculty of imagination made even a cursory appearance in the crafting of this text.
Rather than look to the current hype machine to find out about imagination, it would perhaps be more instructive to go back two hundred and ten years and follow along a train of thought set into motion by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This is by no means a random choice. A lot of the ideas about the imagination promulgated by cognitive science today corroborate notions formulated during the Romantic era.
I’ll begin this inquiry in the autumn of 1814, when Coleridge became a joint tenant of a home in Calne, a market town not far from Bristol. His co-tenants were his benefactor, the businessman John Morgan, and his adult daughters (whom Coleridge had once ill-advisedly and unsuccessfully propositioned—fortunately for him, his impropriety had been politely forgotten). One of the reasons Calne appealed to Coleridge was the availability of a local chemist who was able to provide a reliable supply of opium.
Coleridge was then in his early forties. Thoroughly dependent on dosing himself with laudanum, his physical health was already poor. He had several young children—Hartley, Derwent and Sara—and a wife, also called Sara, from whom he had separated in 1804. Many of his contemporaries considered him to have squandered his own talents. His “greatest hit,” the co-publication of Lyrical Ballads with William Wordsworth (the volume that first introduced “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to the world) was sixteen years behind him. None of his subsequent poetry had enjoyed similar success. He had once been considered a radical because of his enthusiasm for the French revolution and for his impassioned tirades against slavery. His subsequent horror at the brutality of the guillotine and the softening of his radical views made him a sell-out in the eyes of former friends. In short, in 1814, Coleridge was merely on the periphery of the poetry and political circles of his day.
In his rather listless and financially precarious state (he still had a financial duty to his wife and children), Coleridge decided to raise money through the publication of a book of poetry. He asked his publisher for an advance of £40. The publisher sent him five pounds, aware that anything he sent was likely going to feed Coleridge’s drug addiction. Nevertheless, Coleridge went to work. His former friend, William Wordsworth, had just published a new poetry collection of his own, and it included a long preface and a supplementary essay in which the poet had expressed his views on the imagination. Coleridge believed that Wordsworth had defined imagination too narrowly. His plan was to release his own collection of poetry with a preface that would stand against Wordsworth’s, and, for the first time, provide a thoroughgoing account of his own creative vision. He proceeded to work obsessively until the preface became so capacious that it turned into a book in its own right—Biographia Literaria.
It’s hard not to get carried away by Coleridge’s vision of the imagination. It is a faculty of humans that is almost divine. As in the work of the first Creator, the LORD, Coleridge argues that there is a deep and mysterious power responsible for the strange and yet beautiful objects that burst forth from the minds, lips, and hands of humans. Acts of creation require the working of a mind that is, by necessity, active and passive, much like a water-insect on the surface of a stream. If you look closely, Coleridge writes, you will notice how a water-insect “wins” its way up the stream through the “alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for further propulsion.” In human thought, the active and passive powers do not operate on their own, Coleridge argues. An intermediate faculty, also active and passive, must help guide them—the imagination.
In Coleridge’s system, imagination is a human faculty above all others. He places it above a similar but secondary faculty, fancy. There are, he argues, a primary and secondary imagination. The primary imagination is the “living Power and Prime agent of all human Perception, and a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” The secondary imagination is “an echo of the former.” It “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate.” Fancy, meanwhile, can only deal with “fixities” and “definites.” Similar to ordinary memory, “it must receive all its materials ready made.” The constituent parts of any new creation born of fancy always come from the world of sensory experience, while the imagination goes beyond this, willing into being things that have not previously existed, aided by a “predominant passion.”
When I came to write this part, I searched for “Coleridge” and “Wordsworth” and “predominant passion,” entering them into Google to see what would happen. I found myself staring at an essay by my father.
Coleridge and my father keep showing up in my life and have done so, together, for as long as I can remember. When I was a boy of ten or so, I traveled with my father to the cottage in Nether Stowey where Coleridge composed “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” over the winter of 1797-98. My father had helped to organize the cottage’s growing collection of artifacts and letters. Standing under a sloping roof in the second-floor room that had once been Coleridge’s study, I noticed the reverence with which the adults discussed a sheaf of correspondence paper or a quill pen that had once been in the poet’s hands.
My father took me on a long walk to a small stream, gurgling contentedly in the woods. In that quiet place, he told me that Coleridge, Wordsworth, and their literary associates were at one time suspected of being spies, acting in consort with the enemy power of France. Their numerous wanderings in the countryside, sometimes into the small hours of the morning, and their ceaseless chatter and scribbling into notebooks, seemed to suspicious minds like the actions of men plotting to help with a French invasion of England.
My father pointed at the tiny stream. “Does this look like it would accommodate a French battleship?” He laughed.
I remember the feelings I had that day: of allyship with my father, of apparent superiority over those wild-eyed gossipers of the 1790s who had fallen prey to a conspiracy theory. Such a theory—the French planning to invade via the West Coast with help from radical English poets—could have been easily disproven with just the most rudimentary research. From this point on, I’ve associated Romanticism not only with poetry but with the kind of calm power of reason that my father exhibited throughout most of his life.
In his 1989 essay, my father writes that, according to Coleridge, “feeling is an authoritative guide to the truths within our being.” Feeling is the power, the “key agent,” that is at work in the imagination, turning it into a productive force. Feelings are transitory, they come and go like clouds. Yet as a constituent part of the imagination, feelings help us uncover underlying emotions.
What is the difference between feelings and emotion? I think of a toddler falling over and hitting her head. She cries. This shouldn’t be a big deal, but perhaps the watchful mother is in the long-term grip of anxiety: this small incident generates feelings that come in waves—for example, guilt (at herself) and even annoyance (with the toddler)—and these outsized feelings are manifestations of the anxiety, which is the underlying emotion.
Coleridge doesn’t always trust his feelings to take him to a good, safe, or moral place. It is easy to understand why this might be so when we revisit his analogy of the water insect from Biographia Literaria. The tiny creature exhibits pulses of active and passive motion. Feelings, as the product of a mind that is passive, can go almost anywhere. Quoting his fellow literary critic, Paul Magnuson, my father notes that the “subjective random trains of association” that form in the mind cannot be “innocent.” They emanate from the self. Their motor is passion, the body, unlike thinking, which is driven by reason. There is danger here.
A key feature of feelings and emotion is that they reside in the body. Their origins are in the relationship between our bodies and the outside world—with Nature, with other people, with things. In “Frost at Midnight,” the Coleridge poem that my father examined so closely in his essay, the initial focal point is the poet at rest in front of a low-burning fire in the hearth, his infant slumbering at his side peacefully. “'Tis calm indeed! / so calm, that it disturbs/ And vexes meditation with its strange/ And extreme silentness.”
The poet has introduced a series of experiences that are only possible because of the senses of the body. The “extreme silentness” only appears so because the poet has heard the owlet’s harsh cry outside and has been attentive to the subsequent void of sound that rushes in and sits, heavier than ever, on the household.
The peaceful midnight scene causes the poet’s mind to go back to his childhood, and to consider the prospects of his infant child’s possible future. There is, of course, a degree of artifice to Coleridge’s creation. Was he actually able to compose the poem while sitting in front of the hearth at midnight? Probably not. But we, as readers, understand this. We are not so literal minded when reading literature. (Coleridge is famous for a certain amount of self-mythologizing when it comes to the origins of his best-known works. He once said “Kubla Khan” was hastily composed when he woke up from an opium-induced dream and that he simply wrote down everything he had seen with his mind’s eye and had to stop because he was interrupted by a “person on business from Porlock”; hence the poem is a fragment.)
As I was writing this part of the essay, I made a fortuitous discovery. I was still contemplating Coleridge’s quiet reflection in front of the hearth, with his infant sleeping peacefully at his side, which called to mind countless times when I have myself been in a mood for “abstruser musings,” listening to the gentle breathing of my sleeping child nearby, admiring her untroubled eyelids. I then looked at my email and found a new Substack post had come in from “The Convivial Society,” responding to the recent outrage about Apple’s deplorable ad, “Crush!” The author of “The Convivial Society,” said: “I’m glad Albert Borgmann, may he rest in peace, is not around to see this.” Of course, I had to find out about Albert Borgman and soon found myself reading a section from his book, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life.
Borgmann, drawing partially on the scholarship of Martin Heidegger, adapted some of the German philosopher’s ideas about technology for a discussion of how people might be able to live more harmoniously in a world becoming ever more dominated by devices. The book was published in 1984 (which I cannot help noting in passing was the year of Apple’s most celebrated advert, far more hopeful than the ad released over the last month).
Borgmann introduces the concept of “focal things and practices,” providing two examples that he examines in depth: running and cooking. Before doing so, he explores the etymology of the Latin word focus. Focus means “hearth.” To the Romans, the hearth was a holy place, where the house gods resided. The hearth has for much of human history been the centre of the home. Even today, in homes where there is no log fire burning, and most certainly no need of one for the purpose of cooking, there are nevertheless millions of examples of focal points that are very much like hearths. Our home, built in 2020, has one. There is an electric fire, which generates very little heat, set into a huge slab of black tiling, and from the day we moved in, the vast expanse of empty tiling troubled us deeply. It was clear that the builder had intended a television to go there (the Internet hook-up had been conveniently installed into a central tile). We had no intention of making the focal point of our living room a TV. After my father died, we used some of the legacy he had left us to commission original artwork of the exact dimensions required and mounted it in the tiled recess. That became our focal point. Like the Lebowski's rug, it really tied the room together.
An essential element of a focus, according to Borgmann, is it “gathers the relations of its context and radiates into its surroundings and informs them.” The hearth is not simply important for being the hearth—for providing fire and warmth. It is important because of the function it plays in the room, for the position and prominence it occupies, and because of the attention we give to it.
From this initial discussion of the hearth, which is the origin of our understanding of focus, Borgmann discusses how contemporary focal things and practices offer a reprieve from technology—even an antidote to it—and yet he does so without ever being “anti-” technology. In societies that predated technology’s ascendency, the focal point for any given community was often a triumph of human artistry and industriousness—a Greek temple, for example. But in a technological society, the focal point is more likely to be something of far greater simplicity—running or cooking—because these pursuits take on a new meaning when contrasted with the “easy” pleasures of technological devices.
The purpose of a device is to give a customer something they desire with little friction or effort. Focal things and practices are quite different: they reward the person who puts the time in—the runner who started training for the marathon a year in advance, who lost twenty pounds in the process, who got up to run in rain and frost, or the cook who selects the finest ingredients from a dozen different market stalls, and who toils to no public fanfare in the place where the gathering will be held, mopping the floor, polishing the silverware, setting the table, adjusting the lighting, ensuring that everything is provided for the comfort and fulfillment of the guests. Neither the marathon nor the feast can be replicated by technology. There are no shortcuts to the pleasure they provide. Yet Borgmann also cautions us to not view these kinds of experiences exclusively through the lens of our own subjectivity.
For when a subjective state becomes decisive, the search for a machinery that is functionally equivalent to the traditional enactment of that state begins, and it is spurred by endeavors to find machineries that will procure the state more instantaneously, ubiquitously, more assuredly and easily. If, on the other hand we guard focal things in their depth and integrity, then, to see them fully and truly, we must see them in context. (Borgmann.)
If we view running and cooking as means of achieving a state of “wellbeing” or of “feeling good,” we will be missing the point. Running and cooking are only meaningful focal practices when their full context is acknowledged as essential. For the runner this means the streets, the trails, the heat of the sun, other runners, the countervailing wind. The entire context for a runner’s efforts cannot be subtracted from the experience but rather are part and parcel of it. For the cook, the purpose of the gathering, the relationships being nurtured and cultivated, the time of year and the time of day, the setting—these all contribute to the pleasure and happiness achieved. If you were merely chasing a feeling, the danger is that sooner or later, this technological society will find a way to deliver it to you faster and with less effort.
The widely reviled ad for Apple, as described by “The Convivial Society,” features a collection of tools of focal practices— a “piano, guitar, metronome, paints, pencils, trumpet, games, television, record player, books, etc.—being crushed by an enormous hydraulic press (my italics).” It’s an almost unbearably painful visual spectacle to watch, as if your entire life were being stomped on and destroyed. (What did Big Brother tell Winston in Orwell's 1984? “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.” All those tools of focal practices are being crushed so they can neatly fit into an iPhone. The revulsion we feel is the knowledge that this simply isn’t possible: you can’t compress all the pleasure and meaning those tools give you into a pocket-sized device. Once those tools have been crushed, they’re gone. Apple’s ad isn’t paying tribute to creativity, it’s a dystopian glimpse of a destructive future.
Writing poetry (or essays or novels or plays, and so on) is a focal practice. Everything that Borgmann says about running can also be applied to the practice of writing. “Good running engages mind and body,” he says. “Here the mind is more than an intelligence that happens to be housed in a body. Rather the mind is the sensitivity and the endurance of the body.” Borgman’s choice of words is striking. The mind doesn’t just “happen” to be housed in the body. Mind and body are inseparable, and experiences of the mind are experiences of the body and vice versa.
“Frost at Midnight” does double duty for my purpose here because it actualizes both Borgman’s ideas about focal practices and Coleridge’s own ideas about the imagination. The poem’s very setting is the hearth. The act of sitting peacefully, listening to the owlet’s cry, watching the dying flame, contemplating the peaceful slumber of his infant child—these are acts to which Coleridge brings his attention just as actively as the runner brings her efforts to a competitive marathon. In so doing, he is guided by transitory feelings and a need to bring a “predominant passion” to bear on them: it’s the predominant passion, which my father called “emotion,” that gives the poem unity and meaning. The reader is not just carried this way and that. A water insect, once its life has expired, will simply be transported down a stream at the mercy of a current. But a water insect imbued with life will cannily find a way to navigate upstream. In doing so, it arrives somewhere. When humans apply their imagination to giving an active shape to the feelings and images they have passively received, they commit to living fully in the world.
AI can now produce words—sure. But the mere production of words is not what writing is. While I was incubating this essay, Bloomberg sent me a newsletter about the travel company, Viator, turning to AI to help create a new marketing campaign. Don Draper, it turns out, now has competition, because “artificial intelligence and its immense ability to crunch data, pattern match and give novel outputs can also speed up a human-centered creative process.” I don’t want to downplay how serious a business it is for AI to do the bulk of the work in creating a marketing campaign. But this isn’t an example of creativity as a focal point, as a way of engaging with the world. It is a means to an end: encouraging people to buy things so the company can make some money.
While poetry is no longer a focal thing for a critical number of people in our society (I learned recently that Lord Byron’s feat of selling 10,000 copies of his poem, “The Corsair” in just one day in 1814 has never been surpassed), it still stands as one of many artforms invented long before the ascendancy of technology. It is still available to us as an antidote to the dominion of algorithms and screens.
Last week I took my youngest daughter, aged 18 months, into the Mill Creek Ravine. We stopped on a bridge and I showed her how satisfying it is to throw stones into the water. Initially I put a small pile of stones next to her feet so she could easily pick them up and throw them and enjoy the satisfying splooshing sound. Then I pointed to where she could go and fetch her own stones. She was able to pass twenty minutes simply pausing to throw stones and toddling to and from the place where she could get more. Watching her efforts gave me more pleasure than I had enjoyed in most of the previous three weeks put together.
I think focal practices start here: with the very primal pleasure of engaging with the world in this way—skimming stones across a lake, plucking a sycamore seed and throwing it into the air so it can spin around like a helicopter’s rotor, or the more crude pleasure of sounding out the splashes of different sizes of stone in a creek. I believe we start from here and advance to ways of engagement that become ever-more sophisticated, that start to take into account our increasingly capacious store of memories and knowledge.
AI can’t replicate this because AI is in pursuit of outcomes. AI doesn’t have a body. AI doesn’t feel. AI doesn’t enjoy the wind in its face. AI isn’t created in the image of God. AI is chasing the byproducts of our ill-spent human hours, scouring the Internet like a trawler in an ocean that teems with trash and only a very few fish. The fruits of genuine imagination should become focal things, and the practice of making them sets us apart from machines. Our faculty of imagination is a humble echo of the original power of creation that made the world we inhabit. Our commitment to imaginative words is a commitment to honoring this world.
Notes
The past two months were my longest Substack hiatus since launching “The Substack Octopus” in October 2023. Over this time I have been incubating some ideas that hopefully will be appear as essays on other platforms over the coming year, but that’s only partially the reason I’ve been away. Life simply got very busy, and I knew that it would—taking me to Banff and back again, and then covid intervened, followed by a bout of shingles, which ails me still. And the roof of our home sometimes leaks in heavy rain, a problem that’s afflicted us for several years now, for which the insurance company is assessing the cost of possible remedies. Life!
William Levitt, the early 20th-century pioneer of suburbia, once said, “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do.” I sometimes substitute the word “communist” for “writer” in my mind and end up with similar feelings. I suppose, as this current essay testifies, I feel it’s almost a religious duty to prove these words false. Write, I command myself. Write, even if you own a house and lot, and are married with children, and gainfully employed, and have a car that needs some attention, and family in distant places that you need to see—write as if life depends on it!
Books
Biographia Literaria, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Princeton University Press; Annotated edition (Feb. 21 1985). First edition, 1817.
Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry, Albert Borgmann. University of Chicago Press, 1984. (My essay leans heavily on Chapter 23.)
Essays, newsletter, video
“Romanticism and the Cognitive Science of Imagination,” Mark J. Bruhn, Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 48, No. 4
“The Displacement of Emotions: The Case of ‘Frost at Midnight,’” David S. Miall, The Wordsworth Circle 20 (Spring 1989): 97-102.
https://sites.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/Essays/Frost_TWC.htm
Poems, William Wordsworth, 1815. Volume 1 — Preface
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems_(Wordsworth,_1815)/Volume_1/Preface
Poems, William Wordsworth, 1815. Volume 1 — Essay, Supplementary to the Preface.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems_(Wordsworth,_1815)/Volume_1/Essay
Viator Turns to AI for Ad Campaign to Raise Travel Company’s Brand, Tech Daily, Bloomberg, May 2
"The Anatomy of Imagination. Edgar Smith Rose. College English, Vol. 27, No. 5 (Feb., 1966), pp. 346-354 (9 pages)."
“Crush! iPad Pro.” Apple, YouTube. Watch the deplorable ad for yourself!
“Prophecies for 2024,” Sam Kriss
“The Stuff of a Well-Lived Life,” L.M. Sacasas
Image
Hearth at Nether Stowey, Coleridge Cottage
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hearth_-_Coleridge_Cottage_-_Nether_Stowey_-_Somerset,_England_-_DSC01134.jpg