With historian work, I think it’s possible to say this idea appeared at about this point in time and space, even if it was the object was refined from many previous minds. For example, you can tell about when an engineering invention or an art style appeared. Of course you will always have a specialist debate about who was the actual pioneer (often influenced by patriotism), but I guess we can at least have a consensus of when it starts to actually impact the society.
Also, maybe we can have an algorithm to determine if a generated result was part of the learning corpus or not.
But the idea is never original. The wheel likely wasn’t invented randomly, it started as a rock that rolled down a hill. Fire likely wasn’t started by a caveman with sticks, it was a natural fire that was copied. Expressionism wasn’t a new style of art, it was an evolution that was influenced by previous generations. Nothing is purely original. The genesis of everything is in the existence of something else. When we talk about originality, we mean that these things haven’t been put together this exact way before, and thus, it is new.
I don’t disagree with your definition, but I’m not sure what it changes in the point of current LLMs lacking human creativity. Do you think there isn’t anything more than a probabilistic regurgitation in human creativity so LLM already overcome human creativity, and it’s just a matter of consideration?
Human creativity, at it’s core, is not original. We smush things together, package it as something new, and in our hubris call it “original” because we are human, and thus infallible originators. Our minds are just electrical impulses that fire off in response to stimuli. There is no divine spark, that’s hogwash. From a truly scientific standpoint, we are machines built with organic matter. Our ones and zeros are the same as the machines we create, we just can’t deal with the fact that we aren’t as special as we like to think. We derive meaning from our individuality, and to lose that would mean that we aren’t individual. However, we are deterministic.
If you woke up this morning and relived the same day that you already have, and had no prior knowledge of what had happened the previous time you experienced it, and no other changes were made to your environment, you would do the same thing that you did the first time, without fail. If you painted, you would paint the same image. If you ate breakfast, you would eat the same breakfast. How do we know this? Because you already have done it. Why does it work this way? Because nothing had changed, and your ones and zeros flipped in the same sequences. There is no “chaos”. There is no “random”. Nothing is original because everything is the way it is because of everything else. When you look at it from that bird’s eye perspective, you see that a human mind making “art” is no different than an LLM, or some form of generative AI. Stimulus is our prompt, and our output is what our machine minds create from that prompt.
Our “black box” may be more obscure and complex than current technology is for AI, but that doesn’t make it different any more than a modern sports car is different than a Model T. Both serve the same function.
I agree that humans are just flesh computers, but I don’t know whether we can say LLMs have overcome human creativity because I think the definition is open to interpretation.
Is the intentionality capable only with metacognition a requirement for something to be art? If no, then we and AI and spiders making webs are all doing the same “creativity” regardless of our abilities to consider ourselves and our actions.
If yes, then is the AI (or the spider) capable of metacognition? I know of no means to answer that except that ChatGPT can be observed engaging in what appears to be metacognition. And that leaves me with the additional question: What is the difference between pretending to think something and actually thinking it?
In terms of specifically “overcoming” creativity, I don’t think that kind of value judgement has any real meaning. How do you determine whether artist A or B is more creative? Is it more errors in reproduction leading to more original compositions?
oce@jlai.lu 1 week ago
With historian work, I think it’s possible to say this idea appeared at about this point in time and space, even if it was the object was refined from many previous minds. For example, you can tell about when an engineering invention or an art style appeared. Of course you will always have a specialist debate about who was the actual pioneer (often influenced by patriotism), but I guess we can at least have a consensus of when it starts to actually impact the society.
Also, maybe we can have an algorithm to determine if a generated result was part of the learning corpus or not.
chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world 1 week ago
But the idea is never original. The wheel likely wasn’t invented randomly, it started as a rock that rolled down a hill. Fire likely wasn’t started by a caveman with sticks, it was a natural fire that was copied. Expressionism wasn’t a new style of art, it was an evolution that was influenced by previous generations. Nothing is purely original. The genesis of everything is in the existence of something else. When we talk about originality, we mean that these things haven’t been put together this exact way before, and thus, it is new.
oce@jlai.lu 1 week ago
I don’t disagree with your definition, but I’m not sure what it changes in the point of current LLMs lacking human creativity. Do you think there isn’t anything more than a probabilistic regurgitation in human creativity so LLM already overcome human creativity, and it’s just a matter of consideration?
chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Human creativity, at it’s core, is not original. We smush things together, package it as something new, and in our hubris call it “original” because we are human, and thus infallible originators. Our minds are just electrical impulses that fire off in response to stimuli. There is no divine spark, that’s hogwash. From a truly scientific standpoint, we are machines built with organic matter. Our ones and zeros are the same as the machines we create, we just can’t deal with the fact that we aren’t as special as we like to think. We derive meaning from our individuality, and to lose that would mean that we aren’t individual. However, we are deterministic.
If you woke up this morning and relived the same day that you already have, and had no prior knowledge of what had happened the previous time you experienced it, and no other changes were made to your environment, you would do the same thing that you did the first time, without fail. If you painted, you would paint the same image. If you ate breakfast, you would eat the same breakfast. How do we know this? Because you already have done it. Why does it work this way? Because nothing had changed, and your ones and zeros flipped in the same sequences. There is no “chaos”. There is no “random”. Nothing is original because everything is the way it is because of everything else. When you look at it from that bird’s eye perspective, you see that a human mind making “art” is no different than an LLM, or some form of generative AI. Stimulus is our prompt, and our output is what our machine minds create from that prompt.
Our “black box” may be more obscure and complex than current technology is for AI, but that doesn’t make it different any more than a modern sports car is different than a Model T. Both serve the same function.
stray@pawb.social 1 week ago
I agree that humans are just flesh computers, but I don’t know whether we can say LLMs have overcome human creativity because I think the definition is open to interpretation.
Is the intentionality capable only with metacognition a requirement for something to be art? If no, then we and AI and spiders making webs are all doing the same “creativity” regardless of our abilities to consider ourselves and our actions.
If yes, then is the AI (or the spider) capable of metacognition? I know of no means to answer that except that ChatGPT can be observed engaging in what appears to be metacognition. And that leaves me with the additional question: What is the difference between pretending to think something and actually thinking it?
In terms of specifically “overcoming” creativity, I don’t think that kind of value judgement has any real meaning. How do you determine whether artist A or B is more creative? Is it more errors in reproduction leading to more original compositions?