Artificial Innovation
An interesting question was raised at a UKNEST conference last week - can AI be creative? We know they can write, draw, code, make music and more - but are they creative?
Creativity and imagination are often held as a hallmark of humanity, so we set the bar high for AI to beat. We can easily dismiss ChatGPT’s poems or Stable Diffusion’s art as imitations of their training data, not real acts of creation.
But what is creativity? How do humans innovate? Very rarely do we create something from nothing - human progress is iterative, we are standing on the shoulders of giants who are standing on the shoulders of other giants. It’s giants all the way down. That’s why we have trends or movements in music, art, or research.
“But movements have a start,” you might argue, pointing to innovators such as Picasso or Lovelace. Even in these cases, their work doesn’t spring forth from nowhere - it builds over years of trial and experience until a spark of ingenuity fuses concepts together in new ways. Even outsider art is built from pieces of the artist’s life.
So how does AI differ? It’s certainly capable of linking concepts in response to external stimuli; I asked ChatGPT for various novel ideas on how to measure distance and it suggested approaches using quantum interferometry, electromagnetic field distortion, light intensity analysis, time dilation, acoustic resonance, and perspective projection matching. I don’t know if all of these have been tried or are even possible, but it’s not lacking in undoubtedly creative solutions.
It can even handle constraints and offer alternatives; I asked how it could use an egg, a torch, and a blue pen to measure distance and it came up with a method - it didn’t really need the egg or torch, but it used them anyway.
So, what’s different? To my mind, there’s three major things: ongoing sequential experience, internal stimuli, and desires:
Ongoing sequential experiences allow us to learn and link new concepts. Humans are always observing the world around them, AI observe only when called on. Simply by living we gain new experiences and observe how the world reacts.
Desires motivate our actions. . Without desire, there is little motivation for us to do anything, let alone anything creative. Humans have desires that change over time, ranging from short term biological drives (e.g. hunger) to long term abstract goals (e.g. careers).
Internal stimuli is the ability to decide to do something without being asked or triggered. You could argue whether human’s truly have this, or whether we are just a collection of chemical responses, but the fact you can both decide to do something or have a thought pop into your head without someone else asking is essential to creativity.
Most of these seem surmountable. We already give LLMs aims and RL agents rewards that are a proxy for desire, and could in future give them the ability to change these. Self-derived desires based on internal states (e.g. I’m hungry so I need food) are perhaps limited but possible. Ongoing experience could be delivered by a high refresh rate on an observation function call. In my opinion, the hardest part is internal stimuli.
We could create functions to trigger “thoughts” either from inputs, internal states, or (pseudo)randomly, but this feels more artificial than the other approximations. This is maybe we (or at least I) don’t fully understand this either. Why do we think when we do? What sparks an idea? What’s the AI equivalent of going for a jog and suddenly solving a problem you had been working on?
Rather than ChatGPT as a call and response system, do we need a ReadAndThinkGPT? A system that quietly exists, ingesting information, until a new thought occurs based on its experience and desires that it can independently act on. I think that would truly begin to parallel human creativity.
So, is AI creative? Yes, it can create novel concepts by linking ideas. Does it show human like innovation? Not yet in my opinion - I think that independence and freedom is essential to true creativity. Until then, we have creativity-as-a-service, which is still incredible.
And, as you can’t talk about ChatGPT without showing, here’s a poem on the differences between man and machine:
