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Apr 9th - 2 Min Read

ChatGPT Provoking Discourse on the Nature of Art and Writing

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What do artists and politicians have in common? Beyond the former’s passion for colors and the latter’s love for making promises, they - not all - tend to be hard workers who accumulate experience through life.


And that’s what the 20th century German philosopher Martin Heidigger suggested when he claimed the three distinct qualities of a work of art:


- The artist 

- The work 

- The art itself


Naming artists is not a common challenge, nor their works of art, but the philosopher also points out another quality, work.


According to Heidigger, art arises from the work of an artist. Through his life, pushing through the negative and the positive, he is able to find inspiration and convert it into a work of art or written fiction.


Heidigger’s argument for analyzing an artwork makes more sense when authors such as J.D Salinger are able to capture the voice of an alienated adolescent in his novel The Catcher of the Rye, it is a product of his own life and experience. This can also be applied to the famed Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, bringing his father’s poetry through nonlinear experimental films such as The Mirror (1975, USSR)  But the recent monitoring of the popular A.I module, ChatGPT, brings forth these questions through a very intriguing perspective, can art be initiated by senseless machines? For instance, if you were to ask this intelligent chat bot to write a screenplay using Tarkovsky’s style, will he pretend or be creative? And if so, what are the controversial aspects of this argument?


The fact of the matter is, ChatGPT has been a success story. Bringing new ways to artistic creativity and inspiration, but will it affect our exposure to life’s experiences which influenced so many artists and writers?


Whatever it may bring, sometimes a close inspection of earlier written work on the nature of art prior to any development in technology, can make it very clear that we humans decreed our expression through art.