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Today I saw my friend Noor Siddiqui getting some grief on the internet. Noor is the founder and CEO of Orchid, a company that will select your embryos for IVF in order to avoid passing on genetic diseases. As someone with a number of friends who have genetic disorders, this seems highly appealing — I think most parents would want their child not to have to suffer the same innate handicaps that they suffered. Noor was recently interviewed about her company by Ross Douthat of the New York Times.
When she tweeted out a link to the interview, Noor asked:
What if your baby never walks? What if they are never able to live independently? What if you could have stopped it… but chose not to? That’s the question @OrchidInc’s embryo screening forces. You optimize everything…career, diet, skincare…but you’re going to chance it on your child’s genome, one of the most significant determinants of their health?
A lot of people on X got mad at this, calling it “eugenics”, claiming that it invalidated the life of people born with genetic disorders, and generally saying that Noor’s vision of healthy babies is dystopian.
The argument reminded me of one of my favorite essays that I’ve ever written — my New Year’s post in January 2024. It was about how lots of people have the instinct to value human suffering, and to disdain technological solutions that make the struggles of the past obsolete. I thought I’d repost it, because I think it applies to the controversy over embryo screening as well.
“I would love to live to be 50 years old.” — Keith Haring
Yes, this post starts with the latest ridiculous contretemps on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. But I promise, it gets more interesting!
The latest contretemps revolves around a famous painting: Keith Haring’s Unfinished Painting. Painted in 1989, it represented the artist’s impending death from AIDS. Haring died the following year, at the age of 31.
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It’s an incredibly haunting, tragic image. The streaks of paint falling from the fragment of a pattern immediately evoke tears, blood, disintegration, futility; they emphasize just how much of the canvas was left blank. It’s a reminder of how much of our potential as individuals is wasted, and of an almost-forgotten pandemic that claimed 700,000 lives in the U.S. alone.
The other day, a pseudonymous account named DonnelVillager¹ posted an AI-generated image that “completes” the pattern in the upper left of Haring’s painting:
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DonnelVillager’s post — perfectly calculated to simulate ingenuousness, while actually poking fun at art appreciators — was itself a masterwork of internet pranksterism. It was instantly condemned by tens of thousands of angry Twitter users for “desecrating” Haring’s art. Defenders responded that DonnelVillager’s trollish tweet was itself a work of art, and that the furious response proved that AI art has the potential to be transgressive and to tweak the cultural orthodoxy’s tail.
Normally I would just shake my head at one more social media food fight and move on. But this reply by my friend Daniel caught my eye:
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Of course, Daniel is also poking fun, but in a very important way, he’s right. If AIDS had never existed — or if HIV treatments had come just a little sooner — Haring might have created something like DonnelVillager’s AI image. After all, a fair amount of Haring’s other work did look like that.
And yes, without AIDS, Haring very well might never produced anything as haunting or evocative as Unfinished Painting. His art might have remained forever cheerful and whimsical, peppered with the occasional political statement. This June, William Poundstone wrote that “Everybody loves Keith Haring, but nobody takes him seriously…The [latest] exhibition does not exactly demolish the notion that Haring was repetitious.” The AI image that DonnelVillager created is an incredibly shallow thing — an unthinking regurgitation of meaningless patterns in a Haring-like style by a large statistical model. But without the pressure of a life cut short, Haring’s art might never have been as deep as it was.
Yet that would have been a good trade. Unfinished Painting is a great work of art, but it wasn’t worth the price of Haring’s life. Without AIDS, the world might have been a bit shallower, with less tragedy for humans to struggle against. But no one in