On Quality

How to understand the Dissatisfying Nature of AI-Made Worlds and How to Reawaken the Participation in "Being"

Lately I’ve been reflecting on a common refrain I’ve seen all over my X feed: AI-generated writing, for all its near-perfect accuracy and wholly-perfect convenience, is beginning to feel tedious.

Everywhere you look now, whether in essays, news, social media, the writing, while technically flawless, lack something. People are starting to call this a lack of authenticity, most likely referring to whatever spark of engagement that makes reading not just informative, but “connecting” with all the quirks of a personality can breathe life into mere words. This intuitive craving, wired in our ancestral brain for over thousands of years, is actually a feature, not a bug, for it is more than just a bit of nostalgia for old times—it is a dire recognition that something essential is missing that perhaps cannot be replicated by algorithms alone.

As I thought more about this, I recently began connecting the dots with the work of Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Longtime followers of mine will know that I am a big fan of Pirsig’s philosophical “inquiry into excellence” via defining the role of Quality in life. Then it occurred to me that Pirsig’s exploration of Quality—the elusive force that precedes both subject and object, mind and matter—provides the perfect framework for understanding this growing dissatisfaction of our “low quality” experiences in the virtual world.

To explore this in greater detail, the essay proceeds as follows:

1. First, we establish a definition of Quality and outline its metaphysical foundations.

2. Next, we examine its validity through what may be termed the Realist Test of Existence.

3. We then differentiate between Dynamic and Static Quality, clarifying their respective roles in the evolution of thought and creation.

4. Following this, we analyze and argue that artificial intelligence can, at best, augment Static Quality but can never replicate Dynamic Quality.

5. Finally, we articulate the Metaphysical Error of the AI Age and propose a path forward grounded in the reawakening of human care and participation in “being.”

1. On Quality and Its Metaphysical Foundations

Even though Quality can be challenging to define (You should give it a try before reading ahead!), the ultimate test is that you know exactly what it when you see it. You know it instinctively when a sentence hums, when a gesture feels true, or when a motorcycle engine purrs not because the sound was mechanically assembled, but because the pitch itself was understood. Yet in the age of narrow AI generated content, this instinctual knowing has begun to dull. The words and images are all still there: efficient, coherent, grammatically immaculate and aesthetically high-definition, and yet something fundamental is missing. That missing element is what Robert Pirsig called Quality.

Quality, in Pirsig’s metaphysics, is not an object, nor is it a subject. It is neither a product of matter nor of mind. It is the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object. It is the parent of both. In this Copernican inversion, Quality is not an emergent property of consciousness or computation, but rather the precondition for both. It is the luminous moment in which for example, the writer and word meet, where the charged awareness permits creation to occur.

2. Measuring Quality’s Existence through Realism

Even before defining Quality, one of the central questions about Quality is whether we can actually ascertain it exists or not in the first place. If one insists on defining quality through this test of realism, the starting question becomes: does Quality exist?

By the above definition, Quality (the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object) is the source of everything we know. In realism, a thing exists only if a world without it cannot function normally; otherwise it is immaterial and therefore not real. When you apply this test this precisely diagnoses the problem with our world now, the abnormality of it—

The world without Quality functions, but it does not feel.

And a world that cannot feel is not functioning normally at all. It is reduced to a malfunction of the spirit disguised as progress of the machine.

In other words, when we let machines write for us, we have not only delegated the act of creation, but we have interrupted the human experience of Quality itself. Yes, the machine can reproduce form, but not the event. Yes, it can render the static patterns, the syntax, the style, the rhythm, but not the dynamic encounter between writer and world, the creator and the product. And so what results is a world of static Quality without a living parent.

3. Dynamic Quality vs Static Quality

At this point, we need to understand the difference between what Pirsig calls Dynamic Quality and Static Quality. Dynamic Quality is the living edge on the experience of reality—the unpatterned, immediate recognition of “better” before it can be known to be named. It is the flash of insight right before the concept, the felt sense of discovery that precedes analysis.

Static Quality, by contrast, is what remains after that moment has passed: the codified pattern, the habit, the rule, the tradition that is verified. Static patterns preserve the discoveries of Dynamic Quality, giving them structure and endurance. However, it does so at the cost of vitality.

Whereas when Static Quality dominates, creativity hardens into convention, it is when Dynamic Quality dominates that chaos dissolves the form. The harmony of life, and of all true craftsmanship, lies in the tension between the two—between the living pulse of discovery and the enduring stability of what has already proven good.

4. Why AI can only augment Static Quality, but never Dynamic Quality

This distinction between Dynamic and Static Quality explains why AI writing feels uncanny, even when it is correct. Dynamic Quality is the cutting edge of the present, the living stream of value that flows through every authentic act of creation. It is pure, unseen enlightenment, the spark when mind and matter meet. Static Quality, on the other hand, is the residue left behind. It is memory, repetition, the stable form that enables continuity. It is the regurgitated learnings of a machine through a constructivist system.

Pirsig famously said, “without Dynamic Quality, the organism cannot grow; without Static Quality, it cannot last.” And LLM by today’s standard is purely Static Quality by design because it is relatively successful at inference based on copious inputs. The most ominous implication is that the human race will cease to exist if it is dominated by the crystallization of all previous patterns of thought, automated and amplified, without the ability to create anew.

This is why reading AI text feels like eating wax fruit. It looks like nourishment, but it does not nourish. Because it operates within the boundaries of its training data with limited contextual understanding, the words are grammatically ripe, but spiritually sterile. They are built from the record of countless human expressions, but the event of expression—the Dynamic Quality itself—is gone. It’s as if the world were trying to live on memory alone.

In Pirsig’s terms, the metaphysical error of the narrow AI era is the same dualism that plagued the scientific age: the division of mind and matter, subject and object, fact and value. AI is the latest avatar of that dualism as a vast mechanism of replication without perception. It produces the symbols of meaning without the experience of meaning. And in doing so, it tempts us into a kind of ontological laziness, where creation becomes consumption, and thinking becomes prompt engineering. The illusion of infinite capability conceals the absence of awareness.

5. The Metaphysical error of the AI Age, and the path forward

Pirsig warned that classical, dualistic knowledge, though necessary, is not sufficient. To build a first-of-a-kind factory, or to fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right, one must have some feeling for the quality of the work. In the same way, to write with meaning, to think, one must have an innate feeling for the quality of thought. Sure, machines can replicate the structure of thought in a literal sense, but they cannot care; and caring, in the metaphysics of Quality, is not an emotion, but the very participation in being.

The dissatisfaction we feel when reading AI-generated prose is thus metaphysical, not aesthetic. It is the unease of inhabiting a world where the event of awareness has been simulated but not lived. When static patterns have devoured their dynamic source. Where the values of Quality—of attention, struggle, presence—have been replaced by lifeless convenience.

In this sense, the true question of the AI age is not whether machines can write, but whether humans can still recognize the event of Quality when it actually happens. Because to the extent that we perceive Dynamic Quality, that is when we make our own life. And to the extent that we cling to Static Quality (to the mechanical reproduction of the “already known”) we become victims of fate.

The existential risk is not that AI will destroy writing. It is rather that it will, more subtly, destroy our ability to feel when writing is alive. It will habituate us to the dead perfection of the machine and alienate us from the subtle imperfections that makes thought human. And when that happens, the real loss will not be literary. It will be metaphysical. We will have forgotten what it feels like to participate in the event of Quality—the event that makes subject and object, self and world, mind and matter possible at all. That’s because the event of vulnerability itself can sometimes be understood to be the most critical component of experiencing free will.

Yet hope, in Pirsig’s sense, lies not in rejecting technology but in reawakening care, again not as sentiment, but as a participation in being. True care is the moral attention that binds humans to the world they inhabit. In the modern age, this manifests through the frameworks we build, such as how we design economies, technologies, and policies that reflect a genuine concern for people and the planet. ESG, sustainability, and other moral architectures of our time are imperfect, but they represent humanity’s enduring attempt to institutionalize care, to embed Quality into the collective machinery of progress.

The path forward, then, is not to let these systems calcify into static forms, but to keep them alive with Dynamic Quality—with curiosity, responsiveness, and moral imagination. For as long as humans remain willing to care, the event of Quality endures, and the world, however mediated by machines, will remain capable of meaning.