Could a human being, raised in a featureless box but taught English and communicated with using a text-based screen, produce text with semantic value? It seems pretty obvious that the answer is "yes". Will a synthetic mind developed and operated in similar conditions ever be able to produce text with semantic value referencing its own experiences? Probably not now, but at some point?
Perhaps. But the GPT family of algorithms isn't a synthetic mind: it's a predictive text algorithm. It can interpolate, but it can't have original thought; it almost certainly doesn't experience anything; and if, somehow, it does? Its output wouldn't reflect that experience; it's trained as a predictive text algorithm, not a self-experience outputter.
More precisely, I think it would be akin to the person on the featureless box knowing all the thesaurus concepts to say, pain, but never actually experiencing pain itself. They might be trained to know that pain is associated with certain descriptions such as sharp, unpleasant, dull, heartbreak, and so on, and perhaps extremely complicated and seemingly original descriptions of pain. However, until the human actually qualitatively experiences pain, they only know the corpus of words associated with it. This would be syntactic but not quite semantic. It’s similar to the infamous Mary and the black and white room thought experiment, where even with a complete knowledge of physics, she still learns something new the first time she experiences the blueness of a sky, despite knowing all the propositions related to blue such as that it’s 425nm on the EM spectrum, or that it’s some pattern X of neutrons firing.
That said, it’s not clear if this applies to statements other than subjective states. Qualitative descriptions of subjective states like pain, emotions, the general gestalt of the human condition might be empty of content, but perhaps certain scientific and mathematical ones pass the test, as they don’t need to be grounded in direct experience to be meaningful.
"We associate Van Gogh's art with his madness, Da Vinci's art with his universal genius, Michelangelo's art with his faith, Rembrandt's art with his empathy, Picasso's art with his willingness to break with norms, and Giger's art with his terrifying nightmares."
Disagreeing with this is not about internal or external semantics. It also does not imply that "aesthetics" alone create a mental state. Great art is typically rich in symbolism as well. Symbolism that directly references humanity's aspirations, hopes, fears, dreams: the Human condition.
A ~contemporary example:
The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/86/0a/6d/860a6d3c87b349734277...
In my opinion, you don't need to know anything about Duchamp to decipher (or project as you wish) meaning here.
The line of thinking is that there is a difference between semantics (actual aboutness) and syntax (mere structure). The classic example is watching a colony of ants crawl in the sand, and noticing that their trails have created an image that resembles Winston Churchill. Have the ants actually drawn Winston Churchill? The intuition for externalists is no. A more illustrative example is a concussed non-Japanese person muttering syllables that are identical to an actual, grammatically correct and appropriate Japanese sentence. Has the person actually spoken Japanese? The intuition for externalists is that they have not.
Not everyone is in agreement about this, although surveys have shown that most people agree with the externalist point of view, that meaningfulness does not just come from the head of the observer — the speaker creates meaning since meaning comes from aboutness (semantics).
The most famous argument for semantic externalism was put forward by Hillary Putnam, I think, in the 60s. Roughly, on a hypothetical Twin Earth which was qualitatively identical to Earth, except which water was not composed of H2O but some other substance XYZ, an earthlings visit to Twin Earth and looking at a pool of what appears to be qualitatively identical to water on earth and stating “That’s water” is false, since the meaning of water (in our language) is H2O, not XYZ. To externalists, the meaning of water = H2O is a truth even before we’ve discovered that water = H2O.
I think the argument for AI art being pseudoart follows a similar line of thinking. Even though the AI produces, say, qualitatively indistinguishable text from what would be composed by a great novelist, the artwork itself is still meaningless since meaning is “about” things. The AI, lacking embodiment, and actual contact with the objects in its writing, or involvement in the linguistic or cultural community that has named certain iconography, could never make (externally) truly meaningful statements, and thus “meaningful” art, even if (internally) one is moved by it.
If one is to maintain the internalist position, that any entity that creates aesthetic mental states qualifies as art, then it seems trivial, since literally anyone can find anything aesthetic. Externalist intuition effectively raises the stakes for what we consider art, not necessarily as a privileged status available only to human creations, but by arguing that meaning, and perhaps beauty, does not only exist when we experience it.