Comment by bazoom42
3 years ago
You are discounting fiction then. Lots of art describe or depict things the artist never personally experienced.
3 years ago
You are discounting fiction then. Lots of art describe or depict things the artist never personally experienced.
It's not that clear-cut. Humans can empathize, to the point where observing someone getting hurt flares similar neural response to the one in the hurt person. Sufficiently vivid imagination in conjunction with a lot of research can give you an experience "close enough" to the real deal to be able to write about it. I've witnessed an author falling into a deep, clinical depression solely due to the subject they decided to tackle. Not every person is capable of such a deep dive into an experience they nominally don't have, but authors and artists tend to be able to do this. In such a setting, "personal experience" is a fluid term, not necessarily synonymous with "he was there at the time personally" or "it happened to him personally".
When you wake up from a nightmare, you're covered in cold sweat, you have trouble breathing normally, your hands are shaking - did you "personally experience" what you've dreamed of? Authors and artists are in a business of dreaming like that while awake, and sharing those dreams with others.
The AI will surely get there at some point, as others noted, once you model embodiment and imagination it's game over. But it's not as close as others seem to think, in my opinion.