It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. —MacbethIn Japan there’s a museum that collects rocks that happen to look like faces. Big rocks, small rocks, all rocks. Two holes and a line are generally enough for humans to perceive a face, and the rocks squint and smile and frown and frame their faces for all occasions to the humorous oooos and ahhhhs of visitors.But, of course, the rocks are not smiling. There are no faces in rocks—the scientific term for this is pareidolia. No matter how face-like a rock looks, it’s an illusion. No one carved the face, no one cogitated over the face, no one intended a face. It just sort of happened that way. The key difference being that a sculptor is conscious, but when it is instead the wind or rain or the deep fermentation of geological processes acting as sculptor, these things are not conscious. Lacking consciousness, they lack intentionality, and therefore their products lack meaning.The running joke in the rock-art museum is that everyone, from the visitors to the staff, knows the faces are unintentional—it would be a category error to think that these rocks are part of an art museum in the way that, say, the exhibits at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo are part of an art museum.AI-generated artwork is the same as a gallery of rock faces. It is pareidolia, an illusion of art, and if culture falls for that illusion we will lose something irreplaceable. We will lose art as an act of communication, and with it, the special place of consciousness in the production of the beautiful. First, I am no Gary Marcus—I can tell when talent is in front of my face. AI-art (as it’s called) by the new DALL-E and its recent ilk is impressive. Over the last few months it has become clear we’re at the point where AIs can, with minimal prompting, produce an incredible array of images in all sorts of styles. Which has led to legitimate concern for working artists.Vivid Void (In Seattle 4/14-4/17)@VividVoid_DALL-E is breaking my heart.