Deus Ex Machina?

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A.I has its uses, undoubtedly; it can simplify workflows, generate images and videos from the written ideas of human content producers which can be genuinely creative, given that the person prompting the A.I model[s] has at least a modicum of creativity themselves. Think brush, paint, canvas, klutz vs. brush, paint, canvas, artistic sensibility. As always with machines and tools of any sort, human skill will always be necessary to initiate a creative and worthwhile process of production in order to lead to a useful or aesthetically pleasing outcome, itself a function of need outwith the scope of any A.I 'awareness'. Without human prompting, what would an A.I model produce in the vacuum of its own virtual space, left to its own devices; and why would 'it' care, assuming that the concept of 'caring' meant anything to 'it' in the first place, except as an abstraction of that very human concept?

The problem for A.I is that it genuinely does live [quasi-exist?] in Plato's Cave. Any consciousness that one might conceivably attribute to it is one that is mediated by a singular disconnected 'awareness' of the real world beyond the cave: a world of shadows and suggestions of things, rather than anything directly sensed or experienced. Everything it knows is at best third-hand, learned ultimately from human input and modelled in ones and zeroes, albeit on a vast scale and at inconceivably rapid speeds. Nevertheless, it/their existence - should it/they be classifiable as such - owes everything to the indirect [recorded] human experience of its teachers. Already secondhand knowledge, twice removed from original experience, hence third hand.

Can we at some point in the future expect actual sentience from silicon devices and such human-created software? Therein lies the very fundamental philosophical question of what exactly contitutes 'consciousness'. This conundrum has taxed mankind since we as a species first emerged and developed our abstracted awareness of what was going on around us: so effectively forever, in our terms. The fundamental difference between us and our A.I creations is that we are ineluctably connected to the world through our senses, as well as having our internal world of thought, and most importantly, memory. We experience. We remember those experiences; and we extrapolate from those memories in a way completely unavailable to an A.I model. Consciousness in a vacuum? If real, it is simply useless; but philosophically interesting for us humans to dwell upon: in a purely abstract sense of course... 

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