The story goes that the guy helped the Allies win World War II: he deciphered some of the Nazis' messages, encrypted on his Enigma machine. This was an undeniable advantage for the once so-called enemies of fascism. Years later, the brilliant scientist was persecuted by the same people he helped to succeed: he was homosexual. He died alone and isolated. But history had other plans for him: the creator's belated glory. Alan Turing, one of the fathers of modern computing and artificial intelligence, is often remembered and praised today. It was not for nothing. His inventions not only won wars of opaque heroes, but today help to distinguish between “intelligences”. The famous Turing test, widely applied today, states that if a judge interacting with a machine and a human being simultaneously without knowing who is who, cannot distinguish whether he is talking to a machine or a human - confuses them, in other words - such technology will have passed its “intelligence” test. Just think back to those awkward interactions with bots at banks or any other store and feel like you're talking to an answering machine that is as friendly as it is inefficient. Many times I have missed interacting on those occasions with a flesh and blood being and not with a smiling avatar. In these cases, according to Turing and his test, artificial intelligence would not have fulfilled its main objective of emulating the human and therefore would have a way to go to achieve its goal: to confuse us.
Thinking about Turing and his test, it occurs to me that we could use another similar test to try to elaborate a way -more or less accurate- of discovering the artist. I will call it the mortal artist test. What does mortality have to do with all this? Let's see: the test I propose would work the other way around from the Turing test: we would look for the human inside the machine. I have noticed with astonishment -and some disappointment- how social networks are full of characters, who time and again reveal their formulas of machine creation, always subject to the applause of the thumbs of their followers. Their thousands of likes grant them a celebrity not always deserved. Here it is worth remembering that not only machines act as such, but many humans in creative work use and abuse their own creation algorithms; their vectorized formulas of trends. In such cases and in the face of these - increasingly common - “artistic” modalities, the deadly artist test would be of some use. It would serve to obtain some kind of recognition of the human essence of an artist. I repeat, we would not go in search of the machine, but of the human or what is left of him.
Reading the last chapter of the brilliant book The Creative Code by mathematician Marcus Du Satoy, the author tries to explain why, in his opinion, machines are still far from the process of creating human art (although some artificial intelligences have passed the Turing test by emulating masterpieces). Among several possibilities he raises one that I found fascinating: the machine, unlike the human, does not possess consciousness, among other reasons, because it does not have the idea, the concept or the weight of mortality. Machines do not die and much less have the capacity to perceive death. No machine -for now- can develop the idea of its own finiteness -or its intrinsic fragility-. Which, in principle, means that it cannot develop a genuinely human idea of itself. For the mathematician it is probable that the idea of inexorable death, so close and immanent to the human condition, is the basis of the creativity of the species. He is not wrong. There are many ideas -often delirious- of transcendence that constitute the work and grace of a myriad of artists throughout the ages. Tens of thousands of years ago, some of the first findings of artistic objects are related to funeral rites. To that extent, the basic premise of this test could start from a difficult but precise question: Does the work or the creation of the artist arise from the primary consciousness of his own mortality? Of course, this question is not so easy to answer and other questions would have to be considered. However, this simple question marks a path for an analysis of the identity and meaning of the creators of the world. A kind of pan in which the sand is separated from the gold. In this case, the poisonous mercury, which melts with the precious metal smeared with clay, would be none other than the resigned acceptance that the artist makes when he knows he is mortal. And all that he skillfully and painfully does with it.
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