Thanks to AI, the range of what I can do has expanded.
To put it a little more dramatically, because of AI, there are now very few things I feel I cannot do.
That is why I quite like AI.
And that is why I look at the age of AI positively.
In the past, even when I wanted to do something, I often had to stop at the boundary of my own ability. I wanted to draw, but I could not draw well. I wanted to make videos, but I did not know how to use editing software properly. I wanted to try coding, but I was not a developer. If I wanted to analyze data, I first had to learn statistical software.
I had ideas.
The problem was the ability to implement them.
More than anything, I wanted to do many things, but the time given to me was far too limited to learn and do all of them myself.
But with the arrival of AI, those boundaries began to collapse little by little.
When I get stuck while writing, I can think through the problem with AI. When I read a difficult paper and cannot understand a section, I can ask questions.
Even if I do not know how to code, I can build a simple service. Even if I cannot draw well, I can express the scene in my head as an image. Material that would have taken hours to organize alone can now be arranged much faster.
So I do not think of AI as something that replaces my abilities.
I think of it as a tool that lets me move beyond the edge of my abilities.
Then today, I came across an interesting sentence.
Pope Leo XIV, speaking about art in the age of AI, said that there is an “ontological difference” between human art and what machines produce, before there is even an aesthetic difference.
He also used the expression “the spark of humanity.”
“In the age of artificial intelligence, it is becoming increasingly urgent to distinguish between human art and what machines produce. There is, before any aesthetic difference, an ontological difference between art and what a machine generates through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms do not contain the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew its alliance with artists and cultural institutions in order to protect our humanity.”
“Ontological difference.”
“The spark of humanity.”
These two expressions stayed with me.
At first, they felt a little difficult. But the more I thought about them, the simpler the question became.
It is not a question of who draws better.
It is not a question of who makes more beautiful music.
It is not a question of who writes more moving sentences.
There is something we must ask before that.
Who is the being that made it?
Ontology sounds difficult, but in simple terms, it does not only ask “what exists.” It asks, “in what way does it exist?” Even if humans and AI produce results that look exactly the same, we still have to ask whether the two exist in the same way.
Suppose, for example, that a human and AI write the exact same sentence.
“Today, my mother’s back looked smaller than usual.”
If we look only at the sentence, there may be no difference. Perhaps AI could even create a much more beautiful piece of prose around that sentence than I could.
But if a person wrote it, the sentence would contain more than words.
It might contain the memory of a mother who once looked much larger than the child. It might contain the moment when that child suddenly realized that time had passed. It might contain a vague fear that one day they will have to say goodbye. In a single sentence, the past, present, and future can exist together.
In philosophy, human consciousness is often described as always being directed toward something.
We love someone.
We fear something.
We remember certain things.
We wait for someone.
The world does not enter us simply as information. It always enters as “the world I have experienced.”
And that experience includes the body.
The cold air brushing against one’s face at dawn in winter.
The warmth felt when holding the hand of someone one loves.
The heartbeat that quickens before a presentation.
The body that moves before thought when a child is suddenly in danger.
We do not understand the world only with our minds.
We feel it through the body.
We remember it through the body.
That is why human creation does not contain only thought. It also contains traces of having passed through the world with a body.
And there is another condition that belongs to human beings.
Time.
We live knowing that time is not infinite.
We all grow old.
We may part from those we love.
And eventually, our own lives will end.
That is why we choose.
We postpone some things.
We regret some choices.
And one day, seized by the feeling that there may not be much time left, we begin something again.
What am I living for?
Should I continue doing this work?
What will the time I have lived leave behind?
These are not questions that arise simply from processing information.
They are questions asked by someone who is living a life that is given only once.
That is why human creation may be difficult to describe merely as “production.”
Perhaps writing, painting, and making music are ways of saying this:
“I lived in this world like this.”
At this point, it is easy to reach a simple conclusion.
“So humans are superior to AI.”
But I do not think that way.
From here, the story becomes a little more complicated.
Technology does not exist separately from humanity. When technology changes, the way humans see the world also changes. When the camera appeared, we changed the way we recorded moments. When the internet appeared, we changed the way we formed relationships. When the smartphone appeared, even the way we remembered began to change.
AI is the same.
The arrival of AI does not mean that human ability has diminished. On the contrary, as I myself am experiencing, the range of what humans can do is expanding. If that is so, AI may not be something we must fight against. It may be a new environment that expands the range of human thought, expression, and creation.
So I do not want to understand “ontological difference” merely as a wall that can never be crossed between humans and AI.
I would rather understand it this way.
Producing the same result does not mean becoming the same kind of being. AI and humans may create the same image. They may write the same sentence. We may even be unable to distinguish which one was made by a human. But the sameness of the output and the sameness of the being that produced it are different questions.
Perhaps until now, when comparing AI and humans, we have looked too much at the result.
Who writes better?
Who draws better?
Who is more accurate?
Who is faster?
But once we ask an ontological question, the basis of comparison changes.
The question moves from “what was made?” to “what kind of being made it?”
And then the question deepens again.
Does that being experience the world?
Does it relate to the world through a body?
Does it remember the past, worry about the future, and live in the present?
Does it give meaning to its choices?
And can it take responsibility for those choices?
While thinking about this, I recently came across research from the marketing company Graphite. The team compared writing by humans and several generative AI models, analyzing linguistic features that are characteristic of AI-generated text.
The results showed that AI writing is rapidly becoming closer to human writing.
In the case of Claude Opus 5.5, its word-use patterns became closer to human writing than the previous version, and features we often recognize as “AI style” were gradually decreasing.
Even so, researchers still found 2,548 words, phrases, and sentence frames that appeared unusually often compared with human writing.
But what interested me was not the number 2,548.
Instead, another thought came to mind.
What if even those traces disappear someday?
What if AI comes to write almost exactly like humans?
What if even statistical analysis can barely distinguish whether a text was written by a person or by AI?
At that point, how will we distinguish human writing from AI writing?
Perhaps it will not be by style, word choice, sentence length, or expression. AI is already learning those things quickly.
Then I remembered the first question I had.
Does appearing human mean being human?
AI can write about sorrow.
It can describe the heart of someone who has lost a loved one.
It can write a letter from someone in love.
It can create a poem from someone in despair.
Perhaps it can do all of this much better than I can.
But at least for now, AI has no memory of losing someone it loved.
It has no memory of staying awake all night waiting for someone.
It has no memory of feeling that a dream has collapsed and not wanting to do anything for days.
It has no memory of suddenly noticing, with age, that a parent’s back looks smaller than before.
It has never held a child’s hand while walking and imagined the day when it will one day have to let that hand go.
It can talk about death, but it has not lived while fearing that its own life will someday end.
And yet, AI can express all of this very well.
But it has not lived it.
Perhaps this is where the pope’s phrase, “the spark of humanity,” belongs.
There is something in human creation that cannot be known only by looking at the result.
It is lived time.
The decades one person has lived before writing a single sentence.
The countless landscapes one has seen before painting one picture.
The time spent loving, failing, regretting, and beginning again.
That time is not written anywhere in numbers.
No painting carries a label that says, “This work contains forty years of life.”
But we know.
What a person makes carries the time that person has lived.
I study virtual convergence.
At first, studying virtual convergence often leads to conversations about technology.
Digital twins.
Virtual humans.
The metaverse.
AI.
Spatial computing.
But the more I study these things, the more strangely I become curious not about technology, but about people.
If a digital twin identical to reality is created, which one is real?
If a virtual human speaks and acts exactly like a real human, how should we accept that being?
If AI learns my writing style, memories, and voice, and begins to speak “like me,” how far is that still me?
If reality and virtuality can no longer be distinguished through the senses, what will we call reality?
In the end, as virtual convergence technology advances, the hardest question may not be a technological one.
It may be the question of how to define the human.
If we follow the boundary between reality and virtuality, we eventually arrive at the boundary between human and non-human. And when even that boundary begins to blur, we return to very old questions.
Who am I?
What is a human being?
In what way do we exist?
So I do not want to read the pope’s phrases, “ontological difference” and “the spark of humanity,” only as a warning against AI.
I want to read them as questions.
In an age when AI can do many of the things humans have done, what, then, is a human being?
I think this question matters more.
And this question is not necessary in order to stay away from AI.
On the contrary, it is necessary in order to live better with AI.
I plan to keep using AI actively. I want to write with AI, build code with AI, analyze data with AI, and turn things I could only imagine before into something real.
Thanks to AI, the question “Can I do this?” may become less and less important for humans.
In the past, there were many questions.
Can you draw?
Can you make music?
Can you build a program?
Can you write?
But now, whatever the answer is, I am not afraid. If I do not know how, I can ask AI for help and turn it into something I can do.
We are entering an age in which there may be almost nothing we cannot do.
That is why a more difficult question remains.
Why do I want to make it?
Not what can I make, but why do I want to make it.
Not how well did I make it, but what do I want to say through it.
Technology can give humans ability.
But it is still humans who decide where to use that ability.
Just because AI can write a novel for me does not mean it can decide what story I want to leave in the world.
Just because AI can create a beautiful image does not mean it can live on my behalf and decide what scene I want to show.
We must keep asking ourselves:
What do I love?
What do I fear?
What do I care about?
What kind of life do I want to live?
And what do I want to leave behind?
AI will become smarter.
It will speak more naturally, draw more beautifully, compose more skillfully, and write more excellent sentences.
Even so, I am not only afraid of that future.
I am more excited than afraid.
I, too, want to borrow that power and try many things I have never been able to do before.
At such moments, I ask myself this question:
In an age when almost anything becomes possible, what will I live for?
Perhaps the humanity we must protect in the age of AI does not lie in how differently we can create from AI.
AI will come to resemble us more and more.
So perhaps the question is the opposite.
In an age when AI comes to resemble humans, how fully can we live as ourselves?
How will we live the one life given to us?
What will we love, what will we choose, what responsibility will we bear, and what will we leave behind?
Perhaps the “spark of humanity” is not something grand.
To love someone.
To fail.
To regret.
To begin again.
To live today, even while knowing that everything will one day end.
And within that time, to create meaning of one’s own.
Something AI cannot live on our behalf, no matter how much it resembles us.
Perhaps that is the spark of humanity we must hold on to until the end of the AI age.
