>> William Gaddis in his The Recognitions presents a society of forgery, misattribution, and counterfeiting in which enormous ingenuity is expended in the service of inauthenticity. The protagonist, Wyatt Gwyon, produces forged Flemish paintings that require more skill and knowledge than original compositions. His forgeries are technically masterful, art-historically impeccable, and completely fraudulent. Each of his many characters talk past one another in dialogues of escalating misrecognition, deploying considerable verbal intelligence to deepen general confusion.

I'll be damned if that is not a critique of reproducing human-made art with AI.

Edit:

>> The physicist Lord Kelvin marshaled all his physics knowledge to prove that heavier than air flying machines are impossible less than a decade before the Wright brothers flew a heavier than air airplane. Nikola Tesla rejected quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity and argued that future human civilization would run on the energy of the Earth through “earth resonance.” And Percival Lowell used his telescopes to map “canals” on the surface of Mars that he claimed were alien irrigation ditches. These are all examples of the overcommitment, and overdevelopment of an idea, far from the territory in which an idea once grew and flourished or from which it was unceremoniously banished.

And I'll be double-damned if that is not a critique of the hopes of creating superintelligence/AGI.

Stupidity

> I have never heard a rock described as stupid. And the same would be true of a river, a hurricane, and even a thermostat. Stupidity seems to be a sophisticated form of behavior despite its ignominious associations.

I think what we regard as stupidity is either willful or careless failing to consider information that we already have. Of course you have to be intelligent to be stupid, since without intelligence there is no expectation that you will use what you know when planning/speaking.