@NosaneTryhard: I've mentioned a couple times now that Ken Burns released a documentary on da Vinci this month. The central thesis is that whereas (Western) Medieval art up to then had been about prima facie representation, Leonardo channelled his love of life (especially nature) and insatiable curiosity about the physical world into his creations. Painting to him wasn't merely illustration, but a philosophical exercise in exploring the human condition.

It's a refrain I regularly come back to in the AI debate: LLMs can copy and remix, but they can't think beyond their input parameters. We could feed it the collected corpus of European art up to the Renaissance and it would never produce "Vitruvian Man", or "The Last Supper", or any of his technical blueprints, because that requires the imagination to look beyond the known data and inference outside the recognized patterns.

This twins with something I saw a couple weeks back, that the key dividing line between AI-gen and a human operator is that the computer responds with certainty—it does not and cannot question itself.