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I Wish I Believed What Edward Norton Says About AI
No sentence that starts with “AI will never” ends well
On January 6th 2025 — Three Kings’ Day — after the last gift is unwrapped, I find myself discussing AI with my family, particularly a topic I revisit with ever-shorter intervals of apathy in between: how AI is conquering new ground, dodging, jumping over, and even smashing any obstacle in its way.
The last decade felt like a barbarian conquest: first, the outer bulwarks of games and perception fell; then, they came for the palace of creativity. Now, they’re besieging the chambers of thought and reason. In ten years, AI has razed humanity’s self-appointed hegemony. It’s gone from handwritten digit detector to PhD assistant (from narrow and clumsy to broad and clever) in the time it takes a child to join high school.
My dad says — half hope, half plea — that some obstacles are insurmountable; AI will never dominate human emotion or true art because only a human being can feel, and feeling is the wellspring of any kind of art.
There’s wisdom in that: No creation is without the cultural, historical, and emotional context that births it. ChatGPT may be able to generate these exact words but in doing so it won’t be inspired by my conjunctural circumstances. Who I am, what I do, how I think, and…
