The Cat in the Tree: Why AI Content Leaves Us Cold

The Convivial Society: Vol. 6, No. 1

Welcome to the first installment of the Convivial Society for the year 2025. Most of you know the drill: this is a newsletter exploring the intersection of technology, culture, and human flourishing. I’m glad to have kept up a decent pace of writing over the last couple of months, and hopefully that will continue. This post comes just a few days after the last, which is a bit unusual, but I’ve also learned that I need to write the thought quickly or else it will take leave of me. So here, briefly, my reflections on a contrast that I hope illuminates the difference between a creative human act and AI generated content. I hope you find it both helpful and hopeful, even if it is not all that needs to be said about the matter.

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On New Year’s Eve, I had the good fortune of having a question raised by one experience in the morning and the answer presented by a second in the afternoon.

First, the question.

In the morning, while aimlessly scrolling through my feeds (not recommended), I stumbled on a post about a music video, which had been created and edited with generative AI tools. The author of the post noted that, although clearly the product of AI, the video nonetheless displayed a certain aesthetic integrity. He was then subsequently surprised to discover that not only was the video created using AI, so too were the music and lyrics. I would share the video with you, but I haven’t been able to track it down again. I’m not even certain about the platform I was using at the time, although I suspect it was Notes. Perhaps you saw it too. The video had a slight Tim Burton-esque feel to it, and one of its recurring aesthetic features was an eye-like sphere that prominently adorned the motley array of whimsical creatures as well as the landscape. The music was unremarkable. It had a repetitive droning quality—the sort of thing I could imagine someone using as ambient music or white noise.

My response was twofold. First, I reflected on the fact that this digital artifact represented an immense technical achievement. Among those who are not AI boosters and techno-optimists, there can be a tendency to reflexively downplay the sophistication of the technology in question or the impressive pace at which it has progressed. But uncritical cynicism can blind us to reality just as easily as uncritical optimism. There’s no use in it.

But, second, I realized that I was, in fact, having to work up this rather tepid appreciation. In truth, it wasn’t even appreciation for the digital artifact itself. In fact, I was bored by the video before it was over. And, look, I admit that this could be saying more about me than about the AI-generated artifact. Perhaps you would feel differently if you saw it. Perhaps you have encountered AI generated images or videos that have genuinely moved you or otherwise provided you with a measure of substantive pleasure. Regardless of the underlying technical achievement, I find my experience of AI-generated content generally forgettable and often demoralizing.

But I don’t want to treat my reaction as a foregone conclusion, something that must necessarily be the case. Why is this my reaction, and, as far as I can tell, the reaction of many others, too? Why does AI-generated content, though impressive technically, become banal so quickly?

That was the question I found myself contemplating in the morning.

In the afternoon, the answer, or at least part of the answer, came to me rather unexpectedly, while I was taking an afternoon walk with my kids.

In the place on an old oak tree where a limb had once been, one of my children spied this. “Daddy, look!”

We’ve walked this path many times before, but none of us had ever noticed this charming cat, or is it a lion cub, looking out at us. But it must have been there all along. At least, it has the appearance of having been there for some time. And I rather like the idea that it was patiently waiting to be seen. Who knows.

However, long it had been there, it delighted my children when they discovered it, as it delighted me, in turn.

Then, my mind went back to the AI music video and the question it had raised for me. Before I could articulate it, I knew that I had somehow stumbled upon an answer in this simple cat staring out of the tree.

This unassuming act of human creativity presented itself as the inverse of the music video. That video was the product of an immensely complex and costly apparatus, yet it yielded no warmth of feeling and little if any abiding satisfaction or pleasure. This painted cat was the product of simple and inexpensive tools, yet it yielded genuine delight and, perhaps more significantly, a sense of companionship.

Was the difference in the materiality, the texture of the thing, so different from the characteristically smooth and glassy surface of the AI image itself and the screen in which it is encountered. Or was it the context? It surprised us, and that counts for something.

I recalled walking along Florence’s narrow streets, nearly twenty years ago, knowing that I was working my way toward the Cathedral of Santa Maria, Il Duomo, but without a sense of how close I was. Then, I turned a corner and suddenly there it was towering before me. I audibly gasped. This immense structure had managed to sneak up on me, and in that way my wonder was doubled by surprise.¹ This painting, vastly different in scale and scope, had likewise surprised me.

The surprise was important, but there was more. The surprise suggested intention, and intention suggested a person.² The painting in the tree was personal, although I suppose not in the sense that word now tends to suggest. This creative act was not personal in that it disclosed some private dimension of its creator’s life. It was personal in that it bore the marks of a person.

Perhaps this is the aura of the work of art, however simple that work of art may be. The aura is not a property which adheres to the artifact, rather it is something that emerges in dialog with another person. The work of art is a medium: it mediates consciousness. The aura of a work of art is what we sense when our humanity, our personal nature perceives another speaking to us through their creative endeavor, however rudimentary or complex it may be. The aura is the echo of intention only another person can perceive.

So in this cat peering from the tree, I hear the voice of the person who thought to put it there: “I was here once, as you are here now. And I thought of you.”

Now it seemed to me that so much of our conversation around the capabilities of artificial intelligence have been misguided, focused as they were on its approximation of human virtuosity. Can it excel as the best of human artists? Can it fool us by its predictable perfection? But a simulacra of human virtuosity is not what we need. We need each other. We need signs of life about us. We need to know that we are not alone. And this is something we must consider not just in relation to the singular artifact, but also in relation to our environment. In a time of acute loneliness, the proliferation of AI-generated content seems not unlike an act of pollution, compromising the integrity of the social ecosystem.

As I continue to think about the cat in the tree, I might also modify a previous claim. I said that it was personal because it bore the mark of human intention, not because it disclosed something personal about the artist. But maybe I was too hasty to dismiss such a possibility. I think I can learn something about the person who took the time to paint this cat in the oak tree.

I can guess something about their spirit, their generosity, their playfulness, their willingness to put something out in the world without any certainty of enjoying the approval or thanks of another. This painted cat, silly as it may seem, invited me to be the kind of person who would think to do likewise—in a different form, perhaps, but in a similar spirit. How different this creative act was in its spirit from so much of what we now encounter in the world.³ It was a gift. It asked nothing for itself or its creator. Its essence was its gratuity.

And that matters. It matters as an example of an alternatively constructed world. The good life must be accessible, it must be congruent to our nature, and it must be, dare I say it, convivial. We know, although we sometimes live as if we have forgotten, that affluence does not necessarily yield happiness. And we have been formed to believe that simple, unsophisticated things cannot truly satisfy us. But this encounter was a reminder to me, and perhaps through me to you, that the good life may require much less of us, and of our world, than what we imagine. No one needs to calculate how much energy was consumed by the creation of this drawing on the tree. And this particular work of art was not something I could posses for myself. I freely share it with every other passerby. It is not a resource to be extracted.

I can no longer recall where I found that AI music video, but I will probably never forget where the cat in the tree found me. And I will come to it again and again. I may recall it with my daughters many years from now, and think back fondly on it. Perhaps one day I will mourn the loss of the tree that bears the image. And through all of that, I will be enriched and my experience enlarged.

My thanks to the artist, wherever they may be.

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1. Some of you will know Walker Percy’s essay, “The Loss of the Creature,” in which he argues that it is very difficult for the tourist to see, actually see the Grand Canyon.

“Why is it almost impossible to gaze directly at the Grand Canyon under these circumstances and see it for what it is—as one picks up a strange object from one’s back yard and gazes directly at it? It is almost impossible because the Grand Canyon, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind. Seeing the canyon under approved circumstances is seeing the symbolic complex head on. The thing is no longer the thing as it confronted the Spaniard; it is rather that which has already been formulated—by picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders, and the words Grand Canyon. As a result of this preformulation, the source of the sightseer’s pleasure undergoes a shift. Where the wonder and delight of the Spaniard arose from his penetration of the thing itself, from a progressive discovery of depths, patterns, colors, shadows, etc., now the sightseer measures his satisfaction by the degree to which the canyon conforms to the preformed complex.”

What then? Be taken by surprise.

“How can the sightseer recover the Grand Canyon? He can recover it in any number of ways, all sharing in common the stratagem of avoiding the approved confrontation of the tour and the Park Service.”

It is instructive here to consider what Percy tells us about predictability and vision alongside the fact that generative AI is functions precisely by prediction, prediction of the generic.

2. The implicit argument here is not unlike the one I made at greater length in my first post about AI-generated images two years ago: “Lonely Surfaces.” I think it holds up, you can judge for yourself.

3. It was what I once called an anti-viral.