Why AI Will Never Rival Human Creativity

https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-ai-will-never-rival-human-creativity

by fluxinflex • 3 years ago

10 16 3 years ago

fluxinflex2• 3 years ago

AI operates by making high-probability choices: the most likely next word, in the case of written texts. Artists—painters and sculptors, novelists and poets, filmmakers, composers, choreographers—do the opposite. They make low-probability choices. They make choices that are unexpected, strange, that look like mistakes.

Interesting take on the creativity that humans seem to display.

greenhearth• 3 years ago

You ever hear of French New Wave or glitchcore?

fullshark• 3 years ago

Last paragraph is the upcoming reality, and if the economic incentive to hone your craft is eliminated, the quality of human generated art will just get worse and worse.

fluxinflex2• 3 years ago

Indeed, the tenor of the article is that AI will not reach the levels of creativity that humans display, instead our expectations of creative process will be lowered by the sheer quantity. Our expectation on quality will decline so far that we consider what AI produces to be creative and since that is produced far cheaper than humans can, AI creativity will become the new baseline.

CraftingLinks• 3 years ago

It already surpassed it.

13years• 3 years ago

In the age of mass production, people have shown an unending willingness to accept cheap crap in place of costlier quality: in food, in consumer goods, and, more recently, thanks to the internet, in culture

I would add that in part the virtue signaling society has also created the right environment for AI art's rapid adoption. Much of it driven by social media where the game is all about increasing engagement at all costs. Social media influencers and everyone else seeking a following have found it as an easy tool to increase engagement and their income. Social media has increased the number of people who are happy pretending to live an existence they do not in reality.

AI might put artists out of business. It will not, however, replace them. It will not—cannot—make good art, great art: true art.

I disagree with this viewpoint, with the nuance that AI art will indeed become better than real artists as measured narrowly through the lens of visual impact. This is because it is the narrow criteria on what is currently improving the models. It is not art as meaning, but how impactful art is within the one second viewing that someone gives feedback to the machine if it was good or bad.

FYI, I've elaborated further on AI on the topic of creativity with some uncommon viewpoints. See the section "AI owns creativity" for the relevant portion - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things

not_enoch_wise• 3 years ago

What IDIOTS like this poster don't understand is that "true" art doesn't sell ads!

AI will cheaply deliver us the "art" mankind actually salivates for: superficial, stimulating hits of sensation. They may not mean anything or reveal truth, but they keep the attention-manipulation gravy train humming.

What a time to be a alive!

1001101• 3 years ago

'Never' is a long time given the pace at which AI is advancing.

nh23423fefe• 3 years ago

Why did a "creative" person make the high-probability choice to shout out the ten thousandth version of the same misunderstanding of AI. This is just arguing about categories, again. AI "can't" make art by definition, because I decided what the definition is. And my definition is basically just vomiting Cartesian dualism.

And the tide keeps going out. Even this criticism is only worthy of a C-.

keenmaster2• 3 years ago

You are not qualified to make that comment because you are not a true Scotsman.

pbw• 3 years ago

This is simplistic: "AI operates by making high-probability choices". AI has parameters like "temperature" (GPT) or "--creative" (Midjourney) which can trivially steer the AI towards lower probability choices.

My guess is we'll end up with a 2nd "author" neural net to do highly "creative" work. The second net represents the POV of the author, its "life experience" and political leanings. It will choose lower probability options very mindfully, with deep meaning relative to the author.

keenmaster2• 3 years ago

Innovation itself is a copycat process. It is always carried out by aggregating and using previously learned or acquired processes and tools.

The harder it is to copy the innovative process in a given domain, and the greater the number and magnitude of fundamental rules that gatekeep the definition of “success” in successful innovation, the harder it is to innovate in that domain.

AI is moving up the creativity ladder from low copying difficulty and low definition-of-success creative innovation to progressively more difficult and high definition-of-success creativity. There’s no reason to believe it will stop.

When you say AI can’t be creative, because of its predictive and copycat nature, you’re saying the same of humans. It just becomes a semantic argument with little substance. At some point, when AI makes a mind-bending discovery on its own, before making a mind-bending discovery every day, no one will be arguing over AI’s capacity to innovate anymore.

Footnote: The copycat nature of innovation is why it is so sequential. When copying is all you’re doing, it’s hard to leapfrog. All the prerequisites for an innovation must be achieved first, before they themselves are iterated on to push the innovative frontier. When a prerequisite is leapfrogged, it isn’t a true prerequisite, and clever use of ur-prerequisites proves to be enough to assemble the innovation. Clever copy and pasting is copying nonetheless. Even cleverness may be copied :) National, institutional, and familial cultures often systematize different types of cleverness, depending on their objective function. When they face an external shock, they often attempt to copy and internalize some cultural firmware from their opponents/other third parties, or modify their own firmware in the same way that they always do, just with a greater degree of urgency - another copy and pasted trope, with a cartoonishly concrete outline that Pixar can show you in a movie created using its systematized creative process.

Our most impressive and fundamental innovations are coming out of literal systems - university systems and corporate R&D systems, with rules, processes, and quotas. Even the diversity of Turkish cuisine is the result of systematized culinary innovation in the Ottoman imperial kitchen. Now pass me a plate of copy pasta because that’s the only kind of pasta that exists.

Here’s a scary thought: For millions of years, humans did nothing other than hunt, cook, sleep, draw stick figures, and communicate about hunting, cooking, and drawing stick figures.

Those were humans with the same brains as us (if we met them we’d think they’re quite stupid - which is a testament to how much of our intelligence is embedded in learned processes).

Is GPT-4 really that far off from their level of intelligence and creativity? This is not a rhetorical question, and your answer has direct implications for your own intelligence, because, again, you have the same hardware.

Raising a caveman to be smart is an easier problem to solve than raising a monkey to be smart.

ProllyInfamous• 3 years ago

Watching these latest-adopters "poo poo" something that is unabashedly real... is just silly at this point.

January 2023 (after I had played around with GPTs and image creators for just a month), I had two family members ask me if I needed to be committed to a facility... how their tunes have changed, understanding this easily-explored creative technology.

Glad to report that my brain and worldview have helped many others (and myself) see Truth of the New World of Brain/Creativity.

Yusefmosiah• 3 years ago

Ironic to focus on Picasso copying (excuse me, “taking inspiration from”) African art in an essay on how human creativity hinges on originality.

aaroninsf• 3 years ago

Evergreen, and burning notably brightly wrt this take:

Ximm's Law: every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon.

Lemma: any statement about AI which uses the word "never" to preclude some feature from future realization is false.

kelseyfrog• 3 years ago

Just steel-manning the author for a bit: he attempts to position the value of a conceptual scissor between interpolative art and extrapolative art and that this is roughly commensurate with derivative and innovative(creative) art. Furthermore, most large models today are interpolative machines. Therefore most AI art is derivative(ie: not innovative/creative).

I have to question just what proportion of art today the author believes is derivative vs innovative, and if all derivative art were replaced by AI-generated art, would we really have lost anything? Additionally, in which ways, are human-created arts extrapolative? Surely it's not along all dimensions, so by which ones, to what degree? And finally, if extrapolative saliency is quantifiable, couldn't we just have models which extrapolate in the same way and produce innovative/creative works?

It's here that we run out of runway on the author's argument. It feels like an ontologically-based argument couched in behavioral terms. My opinion, and I've stood by this consistently, is that much of the discourse around AI critics(and AI deserves to be critiqued), is that ontological arguments are laundered through behaviorism either through lack of philosophical background, or unclarity of thought, and the result are muddy arguments, black and white thinking, and a host of other unhygienic epistomologies.

Why AI Will Never Rival Human Creativity

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