# Artificial Intelligence and Empathy By [Shadowsweat](https://paragraph.com/@shadowsweat) · 2023-02-11 --- AI is the most radical tool yet developed on the internet for communication. There’s a common trend with developments of technology that allows people to do complicated and difficult things without developing skills or to build those skills in less time. In my last blog I described how we form attachments to those skills we develop as they relate to our identity. We incorporate our skills and the tools we use into the fabric who we think we are when we interact in the world. They become part of our default mode network. But this attachment to our skills and tools encourages us to differentiate ourselves from others. so we naturally sequester ourselves into groups of people who have different skills and interests. This is also a result of the relative difficulty of the skills we learn. Programming is a difficult skill to learn and has a steep learning curve, so people who have learned those skills naturally sequester themselves from those who haven’t learned them. Like I said earlier, though, technology makes these difficult skills easier, it smooths the curve out so more people can access the output of those difficult skills. There are many reasons for this and they don’t all share the philanthropic intent of democratizing access to the creation of beautiful and useful things. But that’s the result and this has bit the “innovators” of tech in the ass many times in the internet age. Artificial Intelligence not only continues this trend, but cranks it up exponentially. In it’s most ideal form AI tools allow us to communicate our ideas more clearly to each other because they allow those without the sunk cost to develop difficult skills to engage in creating the same work as those who have. > example: (obvious) people with no illustration skills can now access the ability to make images that rival those who have spent years learning the craft of visual art. This could lead to something like teaching others about music. Where someone who doesn’t know anything about electronic music could enter into some kind of AI model “make a progressive house track.” they could then learn what an approximation of the style of Progressive house sounds like according the datasets the model is trained on. They could, then, keep refining their questions and it would be really cool for the model to give more specific answers about, say, what kind of structure the song has, the BPM, what kinds of effects it has, the frequency content etc. Think about how this could get so many more people educated on all the different stylistic components of all the complicated micro-genres of music and even teach them how to recreate those sounds. If you can then educate people about things like this in a much more intuitive and engaging way you can being people up to what I call the “Jam Threshold” very quickly and be able to have more exciting conversations with them about esoteric topics. It’s kind of a tool for empathy. (A brief aside on the “Jam Threshold”) There’s something about learning new skills where the “adept” must hit a certain threshold of flow to hook them and keep them pushing past the dip (where the skill gets difficult and improvement slows). When someone is trying to learn a new skill that has a steep learning curve, it’s hard to them to enjoy the process and most will just give up. Benn Jordan has a great vid where he creates a set up using effects pedal to help his partner learn to play the violin. ( [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB-DpDo7rP0&t=379s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB-DpDo7rP0&t=379s)) [![]({{DOMAIN}}/editor/youtube/play.png)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB-DpDo7rP0) His idea is that since the violin is hard to even get good sounds out of, it’s likely that his wife won’t get very far as a new musician just learning for fun. so he wants to set up a situation where she feel the joy of jamming that drives more experienced players to keep practicing. Most skills are really about jamming with others. But to get to that point you have to have the adequate skills to communicate with them properly. This is just like language. if you want to have an engaging conversation you have to have a good understanding of the language everyone is speaking and beyond that you’ll also wanna have a reasonable understanding of the subject matter. I art models specifically and AI tools in general level the playing field. They allow more people to get to that “jamming threshold” in less time on more skills. So I, as a non-coder, can more easily get to that threshold where I can communicate with seasoned programmers and hackers in an engaging way. Again, in it’s most ideal form, it’s a tool for empathy. David Rudnick has [tweeted](https://twitter.com/David_Rudnick/status/1551960555631558657?s=20&t=4tJR0DPKqZo58Z4l1Jm79g) about how disappointing it is that people will just use AI tools for artwork and graphic design and end up creating poor works because they haven’t spent the time to learn the fundamentals, the meta skills, that go into making good designs. He’s not wrong. As I mentioned earlier, the intentions behind the technology that levels the playing field is usually profit driven. Capitalists don’t wanna hire people to do things when they have access to the tools to do it themselves. With years of experience as a broke artist, I definitely sympathize on a certain level, not being able to afford artists and graphic designers for my work. But it doesn’t have to be this way. I think there’s a timeline where these tools cause us to reflect on what we’re actually trying to do in all these ventures. Like, why do we start businesses? why do we write songs? why do we write code? why do we make art? Why do we need designs? what makes all of these things important to us? And, despite having access to creating beautiful things with a prompt, you can’t fully grasp the theory underlying what makes if beautiful or effective without a grasp of the underlying theory and processes of creating those art forms. You can’t erase that fundamental thing that makes certain skills appealing to different people. There’s a reason, that might not be explainable, for why certain people gravitate to coding, or art, or design etc. I see a world where these tools can bring us all closer to a level where we can empathize with the process behind creating these things. Where we can finally undo the curse placed onto us after the tower of babel fell. I’m an optimist, for sure, and I can see how this can all go horribly dystopian, but the way I see it, the only way to find out is to push further and to try to forge these kinds of connections. ![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/a5e499fcf58ea273592dd9236b61c2c07db4a627be6c911d9563781ce4e57dbc.png) --- *Originally published on [Shadowsweat](https://paragraph.com/@shadowsweat/artificial-intelligence-and-empathy)*