The difference between natural and artificial intelligence is not limited to their different origins, or to the presumption of the superiority of the former, for having invented the latter, but concerns above all the mode of “inhabiting”, using and generating a thought and an argument: in the last analysis, the ability to apply knowledge consciously and with the awareness of doing so. In addition, the latter – which we define as artificial because it is produced by a computer – as complex as it may be, always operates like a calculating machine: it orders, compares and recognizes data. It is effective at managing vast quantities, highlighting rules and detecting similarities within enormous masses of information; however it is subject to the obvious limitation of data that is already known. It works on what has been, on existing information, to construct coherent but predicable models.

Its strength lies in its precision, and its weakness in its inability to go beyond, to invent by willful error, deviation or intuition. Artificial intelligence does not imagine: it analyzes. It does not create, but repeats statistically probable combinations. Its horizon is that of the data, not that of the project, and although the project certainly needs data, knowledge, traditions and history, they are not always sufficient to do the job. Natural intelligence, on the contrary, is where thought builds structures that may be illogical, but they may also be exciting and unpredictable. The human imagination does not merely process information: it manipulates, contaminates and transforms it, turning it into something new. The human mind is a laboratory of analogies, unexpected connections, conversations between apparently distant worlds. It has the ability to move between different fields – to leap from science to art, from technology to poetry, from memory to vision – joining things that have nothing to hold them together.

It is just in this freedom of cross-contamination that its creative power resides: the human mind can derive an architectural concept from a musical passage, a structure from a poetic fragment, a spatial shape from a vision. Natural intelligence does not merely observe and record reality, but transfigures it, building bridges between memories, experiences, changing sensitivities.

There is also, in human intelligence, an extraordinary ability to perceive and evaluate the incomplete idea, or the unspoken word. Man can grasp a promise in the unfinished work of art, a deeper truth in the imperfection. The fragment becomes whole, the draft encloses the idea of a possible completed shape. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, tends toward closure, toward completeness: it produces perfect images, without hesitation, but also without that vibration that belongs only to life. The greatest works of art, from the “Prisons“ by Michelangelo to his “Pietà Rondanini“, demonstrate how the ‘incomplete’ is a form of knowledge. The sculpture not entirely liberated becomes a metaphor of freedom of thought, of that tension that leaves room to the imagination and emotional participation of the spectator. It is in the imprecision, the gesture interrupted, that natural intelligence reveals its greatness: it suggests more than it shows, invites the viewer to complete with the eyes what the hand has left suspended.

The human mind is lively and active just because it is fallible, incomplete, open. It is in the margin of error, in the possibility of doubt, that thought continues to germinate.

With an act of modesty uncommon among men, guided obviously by the author, I produced this very text with AI, only correcting a couple of terms that were not consonant with my typical style of writing.

The content and salient elements, however, were already in the “prompts” I had given to ChatGPT. Its powerful engine of calculus made no objection, no protests of “lèse-majesté”, an attitude of submission so “politically correct” as to hardly be human and which I found, to be honest, boring and irritating as all get-out.

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