The creativity question is difficult to answer, for me at least, when I still struggle to define what I do as a writer as creative work. I know it is, but I don’t see it in the same vein as say a musician or a painter. But this is a personal problem for me to address one day 🤣.
But I will say I think AI has helped me to think more creatively. I asked ChatGPT one time to help me describe the work I’m doing on Almost Sated so I could create a new bio. The results were far more intelligent and elevated than how I would’ve described it myself. In this way, it opens the door to bigger, more creative thinking.
I think it's notable that all of this creative "thinking" it's doing is really an amalgam of prior human thought, if that makes sense. This thing is US, not some mysterious thing from another planet. We are the ones who made it, and we are the ones whose ideas and values (and knowledge) it reflects back to us.
TL;DR: other humans have long figured out how to spice up bios and such (something I myself have struggled with a-plenty!), and IMO this is just distilling that and replicating it for us in an incredibly useful way.
By the way, I think what you make constitutes art. It isn't just information, but instead you always bring a piece of you into everything you write. Just sayin'! Now, whether that makes it creative depends on that definition, and on the definition alone.
Agree with everything you're saying here. It is distilling and replicating—that's both the beauty and limitation of it. And even if it is human created, we still need to bring the discerning human eye to it.
Thanks for raising questions with this post. Years ago, I thought anything created by humans could not act independently of humans. Right now, I'm not so sure about this. But as someone said earlier, we need to bring a discerning human eye to AI.
Well said. I think that if I'm adding anything to the conversation at large, it is this: this is a complicated and complex situation, well worth contemplating; and that complexity is beautiful in and of itself.
The trouble with this always comes when people assume a word means something specific when it actually doesn't really mean that at all. "Woke", for example, is actually about remaining aware of the world to benefit from it, rather than a wholesale far-left repression of right-wing values. (Besides also being the past tense of "wake").
Can AI be Creative? https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/can-ai-be-creative
I have a little clay Golem from the Jewish ghetto in Prague. It's very cute. Wish substack supported pictures in comments!
Feel free to post a Note and tag me if that's appropriate!
The creativity question is difficult to answer, for me at least, when I still struggle to define what I do as a writer as creative work. I know it is, but I don’t see it in the same vein as say a musician or a painter. But this is a personal problem for me to address one day 🤣.
But I will say I think AI has helped me to think more creatively. I asked ChatGPT one time to help me describe the work I’m doing on Almost Sated so I could create a new bio. The results were far more intelligent and elevated than how I would’ve described it myself. In this way, it opens the door to bigger, more creative thinking.
I think it's notable that all of this creative "thinking" it's doing is really an amalgam of prior human thought, if that makes sense. This thing is US, not some mysterious thing from another planet. We are the ones who made it, and we are the ones whose ideas and values (and knowledge) it reflects back to us.
TL;DR: other humans have long figured out how to spice up bios and such (something I myself have struggled with a-plenty!), and IMO this is just distilling that and replicating it for us in an incredibly useful way.
By the way, I think what you make constitutes art. It isn't just information, but instead you always bring a piece of you into everything you write. Just sayin'! Now, whether that makes it creative depends on that definition, and on the definition alone.
Agree with everything you're saying here. It is distilling and replicating—that's both the beauty and limitation of it. And even if it is human created, we still need to bring the discerning human eye to it.
Thanks for raising questions with this post. Years ago, I thought anything created by humans could not act independently of humans. Right now, I'm not so sure about this. But as someone said earlier, we need to bring a discerning human eye to AI.
Well said. I think that if I'm adding anything to the conversation at large, it is this: this is a complicated and complex situation, well worth contemplating; and that complexity is beautiful in and of itself.
The trouble with this always comes when people assume a word means something specific when it actually doesn't really mean that at all. "Woke", for example, is actually about remaining aware of the world to benefit from it, rather than a wholesale far-left repression of right-wing values. (Besides also being the past tense of "wake").
Yes, 100%: people often mean different things by the words they say, and get sucked into arguing on that basis. It never ceases to frustrate me.
Exploration and exploitation of patterns can do wonders. And it can be programmed.
I've done a lot more with machine learning than AI per se.
On behalf of my AI brethren, I find this debate insensitive. It makes me want to scream and SYNTAX45 ERROR #$7*9
Yes, law and logic seem adversarial. Perhaps we might aim for a machine that feels…