It is remarkably easy to mistake the way we have learned to appreciate something for the way it ought to be appreciated.
When I think about art, certain things come to mind almost automatically.
Books. Paintings. Music. Sculptures. Films.
Somebody creates something. Somebody else experiences it. And somewhere along the way, we begin discussing whether it is any good.
It all seems familiar enough.
But familiarity can be deceptive. The things we appreciate, the standards we use to judge them and even the words we use to describe them have histories of their own.
I find this especially interesting when we discuss artificial intelligence.
We often ask whether a machine can help create art as though we already agree on what art is, and merely need to decide whether a new method of production qualifies.
Yet our ideas about artistic skill, originality, beauty and creative expression have never been quite as universal as we sometimes imagine.
A beautiful line
Consider calligraphy.
Writing can communicate information, but the physical appearance of the writing can also become something to appreciate in itself.
In Chinese calligraphic traditions, the form and execution of written characters have long been treated as important artistic concerns. A line can communicate movement, control, energy and an individual manner of working, quite apart from the literal meaning of the words.
That raises an interesting distinction.
When I write a novel, I care enormously about the words, but I rarely concern myself with the individual shapes of the letters.
Someone else designed the typeface. Software arranges it on the page.
A calligrapher may care deeply about precisely those things.
We are both working with written language, yet the qualities central to our work can be remarkably different.
And the same object can invite different forms of appreciation.
A handwritten passage might be valued for what it says, how it looks, the skill involved in producing it, or the personal significance of the person who wrote it.
None of those experiences necessarily excludes the others.
The difficulty begins when we assume that the qualities we happen to value most should determine how everyone else understands the work.
The art of making dinner
Food offers another way to approach this.
Most of us have opinions about what tastes good.
Those opinions can feel very personal and immediate. You put something in your mouth, and your body offers its assessment, sometimes with considerably less diplomacy than you might prefer.
Yet taste is also influenced by familiarity, culture, memory and experience.
A flavour that seems ordinary and comforting to one person can be unusual or unpleasant to another.
A meal might be appreciated because it is beautifully presented, because it demonstrates extraordinary technical skill, because it introduces unfamiliar combinations, or because it reminds someone of home.
Some people seek culinary innovation. Others might happily eat the same familiar meal every week.
Which preference demonstrates the better understanding of food?
Professional chefs and critics can develop extraordinary sensitivity to ingredients, preparation and technique. Their expertise can help them recognize qualities that less experienced diners might overlook.
But expertise does not guarantee that every diner will enjoy the result.
Nor does a simple meal necessarily become less meaningful because it requires fewer techniques.
I find the relationship between cooking and art especially interesting because food is both practical and experiential.
We need to eat.
But eating can also become a social event, a cultural tradition, a performance, an expression of care or an opportunity to explore something unfamiliar.
At what point does preparing food become culinary art?
Does it depend on the chef’s intention? The skill involved? The presentation? The experience of the person eating it?
And if an extraordinary meal is prepared by someone who simply wanted to feed their family, does that change how we should understand it?
A chef in an impossible world
Chef Cataclysm is one of the perspectives through which I explore the Max Aura Dungeon universe.
Cooking, preparation, practical knowledge and the circumstances surrounding a meal matter to how he encounters the world.
I enjoy the possibilities that creates.
An environment that another character might interpret primarily through danger, architecture or unfamiliar machinery can be approached through smells, materials, preparation and what might be done with the things available.
The same fictional world becomes a different experience when encountered through someone whose attention has been shaped by a different life.
It reminds me that what we notice is influenced by what we have learned to notice.
A person accustomed to cooking may recognize possibilities in an ingredient that I would overlook.
A musician may hear structure in something I experience as noise.
A painter may notice relationships between colours that I barely register.
Expertise can enrich an experience without making every other way of experiencing it invalid.
And sometimes a person unfamiliar with a tradition notices something that those deeply accustomed to it have stopped considering.
That possibility interests me as much as expertise itself.
When a culture teaches us what to admire
There is another complication.
Our understanding of art is shaped not only by individual experience, but also by the societies in which we live.
Certain forms of creative work receive prestigious awards, institutional funding and public recognition.
Others may be treated primarily as entertainment, craft, commercial activity or ordinary daily life.
Those distinctions can reflect genuine differences in purpose and artistic practice.
They can also reflect cultural assumptions about which activities deserve prestige.
I find it difficult to believe that artistic value is distributed neatly according to the labels we have inherited.
A carefully constructed game world can contain extraordinary storytelling.
A traditional craftsperson may spend decades mastering work that receives little recognition outside a particular community.
A popular song may become deeply meaningful to millions of people while being dismissed as uninteresting by critics.
A technically impressive work can leave an audience completely indifferent.
I do not think these examples demonstrate that all creative work is equally good.
They suggest that the criteria we use deserve examination.
The difficulty of stepping outside ourselves
One danger in exploring other traditions is that we might begin treating them as alternative ways of confirming things we already believe.
We encounter an unfamiliar understanding of artistic expression and immediately translate it into our own familiar categories.
Perhaps we recognize intention, experience or originality and decide that the tradition was really concerned with the same questions we are.
Sometimes there may be genuine similarities.
But there may also be important differences that become invisible when we interpret everything through our existing expectations.
I think this applies to artistic criticism more generally.
When I encounter a work that I struggle to appreciate, there are several possibilities.
Perhaps I am missing something important.
Perhaps the work is unsuccessful at what it attempts.
Perhaps it values qualities I have never learned to notice.
Or perhaps it simply does not appeal to me.
Those possibilities are not interchangeable, and I cannot always distinguish between them immediately.
That is one reason I find it useful to encounter perspectives I do not already share.
Not because I expect to adopt every one of them, but because they might reveal limitations in how I understand the things I value.
The questions we bring to AI
When someone asks whether AI-assisted literature is art, the question often arrives carrying assumptions about what artistic creation ought to involve.
Some people emphasize technical skill.
Others care about intention, personal experience, originality or the emotional relationship between creator and audience.
Still others are concerned with cultural context, attribution or the ethics of how the technology was developed.
These are different concerns.
They may overlap, but they should not be treated as though they are all asking exactly the same thing.
For me, the creative process involves imagining, exploring, choosing, revising and giving form to ideas that previously existed only as possibilities.
That is the experience I bring to the discussion.
Someone whose understanding of art is rooted in mastery of a particular physical craft may approach the same question from a very different direction.
Neither perspective becomes universal simply because it feels obvious to the person holding it.
I think that is worth remembering before we begin deciding which forms of creation deserve to be called art.
There is an enormous world of things people make, perform, experience and value.
I would rather remain curious about its variety than assume that the categories I inherited already describe all of it.