The biggest story of the year — the story we should all be paying attention to — is the increasing power of artificial intelligence. Computer code can write itself, chatbots can generate academic papers, and, with a few keystrokes, a website can produce an image worthy to be framed on any wall. Everywhere we turn, AI is outputting text and images that mimic (and often surpass) humans’ abilities.

There’s so much to be concerned about in these developments, especially in the realms of plagiarism and labor replacement, with artists and writers particularly worried about their job prospects drowning in the infinite sea of AI-generated graphics and essays.

However, after taking stock of AI’s current limitations, I don’t think that artists and other creatives are in danger of extinction anytime soon. To my mind — and to many theorists, critics and media lovers — the most compelling artistic expressions contain some sort of original idea that reflects a lived human experience, and contemporary AI models lack exactly this capacity. In short: Even if AI bots can create passable text blocks and captivating graphic designs, they cannot fabricate the sort of genuine art that speaks to our humanity.

At their most basic, current AI models are engineered to reorder information they’ve seen before. While different bots accomplish this task in slightly different ways, each system is designed to observe huge amounts of data and then find predictable ways that the data is ordered. In the case of visual art, a bot studies which colors and shapes tend to occur near one another, while text bots identify how words and topics are organized. These programs then output a convincing painting, poem or essay that re-forms the shapes, words, colors and topics that they’ve observed within their data sets, always using some version of the organization found in their original data.

Surely, many of our daily tasks involve simple reorderings of past information, from book reports to obituaries to police sketches to legal briefs. In each, an author does some research and constructs a product based on already-existing information. We should be prepared for AI to dominate these types of recombinational tasks in the coming years.

But none of this is exactly art.

Having an original idea, expression or epiphany — having an experience that no one taught you to have — is a deeply human act and also impossible for AI — at least in the engineering behind today’s most-used bots. While an AI-generated poem, story or painting might reorder existing information in new, believable and compelling ways, it is using preexisting building blocks drawn from its data set.

One further simple but crucial fact separates AI bots from genuine originality: They do not experience the world around them. No one teaches us the enjoyment of sunlight against our skin or the despair of losing a parent or the fulfillment of growing old with your husband.

When a song, novel or painting truly moves me, it entangles my own experience into the story being told by that work of art. With only secondhand knowledge of the human experience, AI’s output will never actually express the existential sensation of living in the world.

At present, AI can do many things — it can make beautiful visuals, compelling essays and interesting poetry. But it cannot participate in the fleshy, awkward, complex and unique human condition. And because it cannot experience, it cannot create something truly new and meaningful. That solidly remains the domain of us humans.

Chris White teaches music theory at University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Harvard University. His research uses big data techniques to study how we hear and write music, which is the subject of his book “The Music in the Data.” © 2023 Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.