A Note from the Founder: What AI Will Never Know
A personal reflection from James McCoy, Founder of Foxtail Green Press
The adoption of AI into our everyday lives has left some of us worried about the future of our jobs, and the future of the arts and creativity in general. If our employer can replace us with a chatbot, if entire books can be written in minutes, and if art can be generated without the need for creative process, where does that leave humanity? As generative AI grows in sophistication, there are many who are left wondering what purpose human input will have in the future beyond finessing algorithms and code. AI can certainly produce a compelling story with a few strategic prompts, complete with characters, dialogue and a carefully constructed plot. But what it cannot reproduce are the deeply personal connections between time, place, words and memories – something only the human brain can make.
The other morning, I reached for a cup out of the cupboard to enjoy my morning coffee. There’s nothing particularly special about this process: it’s something I do nearly every morning. Like a lot of households, we have a collection of mugs of varying shapes, sizes and colours. On that morning, I opted for a bright yellow mug. It was a random choice and a divergence from the mug I usually choose. As I poured my coffee, the colour of the mug triggered a memory from some 40 years ago – of a pottery class I took in high school. As part of my final exam for that class, I created a ceramic mask that I ended up painting bright yellow, the exact same tone as my coffee mug. I remembered how my good friend at the time, Mitch, laughed because it looked like the head of a Shogun Warrior toy that was popular at the time.
That made me wonder: What happened to my own Shogun Warrior toy, which I played with when I was younger? Then I remembered that the toy ended up at my grandmother’s house, discarded in her basement once I felt I’d outgrown it. I wondered then what would have happened to that toy after my grandmother’s passing when my uncle sold the house. I then wondered what also happened to all of my grandmother’s Christmas decorations, one of which – a blue glass bauble – had my name spelled out in glitter across its middle. I then started to wonder about all the other Christmas ornaments from my youth – those that hung on my grandmother’s tree and those that lived on our family tree, some of which I made myself as a child.
If this sounds like a rambling story, it’s only because this is how the human brain works – making connection after connection from a simple object or event. From the banal, everyday task of pouring coffee to Christmas ornaments long lost to time, my mind made seemingly unrelated connections – and all in a matter of seconds (if not split seconds).
For the purpose of experimentation for this blog piece, I typed into a well-known AI interface that the mug from which I was drinking my morning coffee was yellow. This was its response:
“Yellow mugs do have a certain presence to them. Bright enough to feel warm and awake, but not as harsh as something like pure red. It’s the sort of colour that makes a kitchen or desk feel a bit less grey on a dull day.”
Its reply was not untrue, of course, but there was no human thought process involved there at all. The connections made were in relation to colour and to the assumed environment (my kitchen). Even if the AI had information about me based on previous interactions, it would be impossible for it to remember my pottery class, or a friend I’d not thought about or even heard from in decades, a childhood toy, my grandmother’s basement and, eventually, specific Christmas ornaments that live in childhood memories. No amount of programming can replace our brain, our experience, or our memories.
For several years, I worked as a funeral celebrant and eulogy writer, and the most valuable part of that work was never the writing itself. It was the conversations: sitting with families, listening to their stories and watching one memory spark another – a favourite chair, a song on the radio, a phrase someone always used. AI can certainly produce a eulogy, and it will reach for words and phrases designed to move us. But real emotion comes from real memory, from lived human experience. The connections our brains make are shaped by our lives, and they’re unique to each of us. No algorithm or code can ever replace that.
