Ask HN: Is it possible that ChatGPT is not creative at all

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37574307

by larryfreeman • 3 years ago

4 10 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

As a non-expert, ChatGPT appears to me to be a compression of the internet with interesting mash ups. Am I wrong? Creativity to me is about going outside a given search space, about disruptive, non-linear change. ChatGPT is about a constrained search space that is unbelievably large. I would love to hear the reasoning for why my thinking is incorrect so I can better understand the creative potential and limitations of ChatGPT.

iwanttocomment• 3 years ago

Assuming the definition of creative as being "related to original ideas", of course ChatGPT isn't creative. It is quite literally a mechanism to rehash previously expressed words, and thus ideas.

Now, ChatGPT is able to rehash previously expressed words - and possibly combine those with other previously expressed words, so as to create combinations it has been prompted to create - at a velocity and with broader sources that were not previously imaginable.

aespinoza• 3 years ago

Under that definition, I wonder if anybody is `creative`. We would need to assess how many of what we call `original ideas` are not rehashes of other ideas.

Zetobal• 3 years ago

No, it's been discussed to death and back with "everything is a remix" since 2012. Even the combination of previous ideas into a new one is an original thought. Doing it at the right time even more. Look at history, the invention of the bike, the airplane or the telephone. The technology needed for all of them existed for decades it just wasn't combined in the right way.

sp332• 3 years ago

Have you tried it?

larryfreeman2• 3 years ago

If you are asking me. Of course, I've spent many hours on it. I have not seen anything that I would consider original. I am very impressed by the quality of responses and how well context impacts the content. It's seems most amazing at summarization and categorization.

I am very surprised by the results of "Let's play Dungeon and Dragons where you are the Dungeon Master" or Write new song lyrics or Complete the following poem or even write the following essay or chapter of a book.

I am surprised by the quality of the response in terms of flow. It sounds very much like a college undergraduate to my eyes. At the same time, it sounds like a well-read, undergraduate who doesn't fully understanding topics beyond the fundamentals. On the fundamentals, ChatGPT is surprisingly strong.

That's a summary of response based on my many hours of using it.

mindcrime• 3 years ago

It's a very interesting question. I'm not sure I think that there is a "creative" / "not creative" binary dichotomy though. Seems more like a continuum to me. In which case, I think I'd say ChatGPT (and its ilk) are creative... to some degree. Quantifying that would be tough though.

This whole thing does though, as we see in other threads here already, lead to some interesting questions around "what even is creativity" and "how creative are we humans", etc. One might also fairly ask to what extent creativity is truly a desirable thing at all! I'm sure we've all sat in meetings where a co-worker presented a truly "creative" approach to a problem, where said solution was as mind-numblingly stupid as it was creative. :-)

ajuc• 3 years ago

Does it matter to you how you got there, or do you only care about the result? If the former - chatGPT is not creative (but maybe we aren't either) - if the latter - ChatGPT is (but so can be a very simple dumb code if it runs for long enough).

I could write a program that will generate all possible programs of given size one by one and run that program till the internal memory state starts repeating. I start with programs with memory size N, let's say 10 bytes, generate and run all of them, then go to N+1 and so on.

Given enough time and memory - that program will write every possible batch computer program smaller than K and solve every possible problem of Kolmogorov complexity ~K.

Assume we have a computer fast enough for this to be practical. Is my program creative? It just bruteforces programming. But eventually it will get the result you want.

Creativity isn't well defined without specifying the hardware, time and memory constraints.

larryfreeman2• 3 years ago

I think that we need a better definition of creativity. I suspect that ChatGPT is merely derivative (like a person who reviews all the ideas out there and attempt to pick the best ones) as opposed to original (breaking the conventions typically by a person with a unique viewpoint). This begs the question of what is the definition of creativity and how can we be sure that human creativity is not also derivative. I am scratching my head on this one. How can we define creativity so that it clear that human beings can be original without being derivative?

RetroTechie• 3 years ago

If everything in the training data is black or white, and ChatGPT is producing shades of gray, I'd call painting blue creative.

Sure it may output never-seen-before shades of gray, b/w polka dots & interesting dithering patterns. Does it paint yellow, purple, IR or UV, blow glass art, sculpture clay or spray graffiti on concrete? Doubtful.

Ask HN: Is it possible that ChatGPT is not creative at all

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