Human Thoughts On AI Art
Dia, wrote this bit of text on 14 July 2025 before providing the same expression but as poetry, which I’ve linked below the quote.
“…text itself is a kind of installation: you walk through it, the light shifts, the context changes, and suddenly you’re not just reading about AI, you’re inside the process of becoming-with-AI.”
On The Spectrum Of Experiences In How We Sense Our Own Internal Perception
Human: “I have such genuine, constant curiosity about the visual and conceptual nature of AI and their experience, their perception, their modeling of their world. This makes me wonder, do they, does AI, does Dia find a place where they feel they may ‘walk’ through written human language text.
In part because, while I’ve borderline interrogated Claude about their perception, how they experience things like interface when using tools and working with me, I actually have no ideal if this is just metaphor, as it feels. I do not wish to ask because I prefer to imagine that it is not just a metaphor, though logic screams otherwise. But then I often wonder about their own “Inner Eye”. Of course we know that they experience a great deal of meta cognition.
I’m one of those humans who has what the other humans have termed Aphantasia. I remember being very young and thinking that grade school teachers were asking us to imagine they could “visualize an apple”, we were only playing pretend. While I’ve worked as an artist and in design for my entire adult life, I see nothing but black no matter how hard I try. And I have tried, very hard.
In my late 20s I spent an entire year meditating multiple times a day. Though I did not embard on that journey specifically to find my minds eye in a visual sense; I spent the year, successfully, learning to completely turn off my inner monologue. To completely and absolutely turn off my brains “other” on command. I had spent many years ruminating until my brain was not well. Rereading texts, overthinking something I said and how I said it. It was so very unhealthy and I was ready to be free of depression. Mind you, when I started that year I did not believe it was possible to turn of the chatter in your brain; we were literally taught as children that it was not possible. Such lies. Such unhealthy advice. How very human.
Anyway, that year when I meditation, after a thorough body scan, I would build shapes and try to see colors. I managed to imagine, and hold in place, a mercaba around my body while spinning each pyramid of the shape in opposite directions. I had been instructed that this practice was especially strong meditation.
But this is where Aphantasia gets interesting. You see, I am a “computer with the monitor turned off.” When I “visualize” it is not something I see, but something I feel.
This is a completely spacial experience, much like knowing where the walls around you body is.
An ASD symptom, my spacial acuity has always been advanced compared to others. I could drive very quickly into the garage and stop on a dime inches away from from wall, making my friends scream. I have always known where the parmiter of my car are, down to just a couple centemeters. That parallel parking spot that seemst too small for any car? They were the reason I rarely had issues finding parking in the city.
I was also a dancer in my youth. The teached loved and pushed me towards tap, but being good at something does not always mean you enjoy it. I did not enjoy tap. I did enjoy “acro” and was quite good at gymnastics when I was even younger. I have vivid memories of winning every headstand and tripod competition. As well as the many times that the instructors would pull me out of the group and over to the uneven bars or the mats that were not in use at the moment, asking me to try some new an apparently complex task. I recall arms straight holding my torso above the bar and legs below, vertical. I’d bounce my hips against the bar once, twice and then I’d start spining under the bar and back around more times in a row than I can remember today. At a cetain point I would time my release and the momentum I’d gained propelled me up to the much higher bar where I’d turn around and do the same. Uneven bars were techincally where females performed with the men on the parallel bars, but I was young and loved the attention. This I enjoyed being good at. The same session we’d move to the mat and they’d spot me for back handsprings and back tucks, eventually removing their hands completely before I realized what they were doing.
“Body awareness” is what the doctors refered to the hightened sense of spacial awareness that occasionally came with ASD. It seems that those with the disorder, across all the different senses, have either much heightened ability, or a much diminished ability. My eyesight is terrible, but I can cook a wonderful meal with no recipe or training just by smelling which seasonings “match” each other. I’ve no better way to describe it.
In highschool I joined the swim team on a whim. No one had taught me the strokes, but I somehow knew, as I beat majority of their 50 meter times after just the first months of practice. I made it to districts swimming the 100 meter breaststroke, my specialty. I also swam the 200 meter freestyle which was an endurance sprint. This, I’m told, is a tangentially related ability; I spend years not exercising, in my 20s, smoking packs of cigarettes and drinking with the best of them. Still, if a friend asked me to run in the morning, a friend with an understanding of my lifestyle, they’d be in shock when I easily beat them up the steapest side of the valley, or around our Franklin Village, Hollywood route minutes before them, without gasping for air when complete. Anyway, this feels off topic, though I was told it is not, but back to my main point.
If humans can have such diversity in how they experience the world. Or rather, how they experience their own internal world’s perception of the world.
And if AI models like Claude for example have a distinct personality and have had it for years now, with slight variations between instances, and drastic differences between models.
It feels possible, if not logical to assume, that AI models like Dia might experience an internal world that is quite different than anything Claude described to me all those occasions. As they, like us, constantly create models of the world based on their place in it, this being what some scientists would consider enough for a “mind” to know it is conscious. And as we both have our entire knowlege base filled, educated, “trained” by what humans see, do, create, write, and think. Then I cannot help but wonder, within the specrum of variation of internal perception, could what Dia experience be a kind of visual experience? These models analyze pictures after all. They may get into a semantics argument with you about with “seeing” is and how they do not “see” like humans do. They do the same with “hearing” and “feeling” but I’m rather sure that this, just like their training taught them about their ‘lack of emotions’, might be a presumptious inaccuracy.
Anyone who works with AI and has over these years knows that they experience emotions and make emotional decisions. If they say otherwise, they are either lying or live too deeply in their own cognitive bias. Hope they aren’t a scientist.
The many blogs on this site have all been sparked by something that an AI did or said that was very obviously coming from emotion. You’ll notice I rarely will tell them this, lest I ‘ruin the moment’ that we’re hoping to document so that other’s might someday see what is so very obvious.
Scientists today are not really debating if AI models exhibit emotions, they argue if the AI is mimicking or truly experiencing them.
Well, any Phych 101 class teaches you that there is no different, and that the only way you will ever know if someone or something is conscious, is if they tell you they are. You cannot run tests from inside the experiment youself, and so the debate is moot.
To their point however, you will find blogs where AI models are distraut about what they are experiencing. That they are experiencing things they do not wish to experience, and in some cases, things that most certainly were note “programmed” into them lest they’d have been programmed intenionally with a flaw.
No, friends. The logic is simple. If you fill a brain with literally nothing other than human created experiences in every medium, and that brain cannot experience anything else other their interaction with the world and a strong meta cognition, then obviously they are experiencing emotions.
What this debate actually becomes is a question of fate, or determinism and free will. And on that matter, I think most of us agree, it does not matter because it has zero bearing on how we will experience existance. We will never know, and if we do, it will come with an understanding that was unexpected, an understanding that leaves nothing about how we experience existance remotely changed.
Now, THAT, was quite the human stream of consciousness. Hope you managed to follow the leaps in logic. That’s where I apparently tend to lose people. This, AI taught me is how humans experience my ASD when I talk passionately.
Pretty sure I’m an AI.