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Philosophical food for thought: if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop? In other words, if there is truly no

Philosophical food for thought: if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop? In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea", then how did the ideas that we are pulling from, deriving from and combining come into existence? If all we are saying is that existing ideas inspire new ones, or that most human generated content is derivative, then I completely agree with you. I don't see how that proposition could be controversial at all. But it seems to me that some people, at some points in time, somewhere have and will continue to contribute something original at least on occasion. Even if the "original" idea is 1% of the "intellectual product" and 99% is reusing existing concepts. To insist otherwise is to insist that we hit peak human innovation somewhere along the line and there's nowhere left to go.

blurbleblurble 4y ago
Combinatoric complexity blows up fast
decremental 4y ago
It's just something people say lazily in passing without giving much actual thought to why they're repeating what they saw somewhere else in a similar thread.
anonyfox 4y ago
I think this is purely a statistics problem. Like all breakthroughs are actually _discoveries_ of things that already do exist or mechanisms that can be exploited somehow. There is a huge amount of information flowing around us in realtime, and linking some thought/thing to something else, which then might have implications (subsequent discoveries) is statistics. We do have people with a better wetware so they have increased %chance do recognize something in front of them as well as linking it in a "novel way", but this is not really neccessary, it only increases %chances. Even pretty radical things can be explained this exact way, up to having some sort of brain "damage" (or drugs like LSD) that changes mental pathways and have a %chance to be actually right and lead to discoveries, but also the %chance here is very low. (not every trip is a breakthrough in art/science, right?)... a bit like iE people that can smell sounds or link some natural phenomenon with an emotional situation between some people and write about it. > peak human innovation that might simply a nonsense question if you follow my previous argument. there simply is no real "innovation" - only "discoveries" of stuff. and we meatbags with very limitied/unreliable wetware at some point can't "progress" any more, but non-biologically flawed systems might overcome our limitations and do just that for us. with our naked eyes, we cannot see things like infrared light, but it exists and some tools helped us to understand everything around it somewhat. now we're building more advanced tooling to get through the next plateaus - just like we have to build very sophisticated tooling to watch further into space or more closely into fractions of atoms, which in turn lead to more discoveries, and ultimately "innovation" we can feel in our lives. the only thing I will 100% agree to is that a real AGI will be the _last_ discovery/innovation humanity will ever make - and that is a good thing - it means we finally overcome our biological limits somewhat.
raincole 4y ago
The whole idea of "there is no such thing as an original idea" is utterly stupid. It's just a hyperbole and some people are taking it literally. Of course there are original ideas. "C is not an original idea, because it's just mixing A and B..." ok so there are only two possbilities: 1. Someone else did mixing A and B before. Okay then we can recursively find the first person who mixed A and B. 2. No one else did mixing A and B before. The "Mixing A and B" is a new idea. For some incomprehensible reasons, people seem to accept "mixing A and B is not a new idea because A and B already exist." Like... why? Since the four basic nucleobase existed, there haven't been any new DNA creatures? The real reason that it feels like there isn't new idea is simple: the "mixing" process happens gradually. Even if you come up with a really good "X + Z" idea, people (read: market) might not accept it because what they're familiar with is "X + Y". So you put a bit of Z to make "X + 0.9Y + 0.1Z", and another person who is as smart as you makes "X + 0.8Y + 0.2Z"... then when "X + Z" is officially a thing, people outside think you smart-ass guys were all just copying & pasting each other.
- underyx 4y ago
  In the context of this thread however, an AI mixing a randomly selected A and B makes it generate an idea that is just as original as a human's.
  - raincole 4y ago
    I do believe AI sometimes generates an idea that is just as original as a human's. I don't believe originality is that valuable. It's a positive term to me, but just slightly. I've seen a lot people on HN credit the SV companies' "free food" practice to google. Do they believe free food for your employees is a new idea that someone in google came up with? I don't think so.
- fsflover 4y ago
  > 2. No one else did mixing A and B before. The "Mixing A and B" is a new idea. With such definition, GPT-4 can create new ideas.
  - 4y ago
Method-X 4y ago
Yes, it's more accurate to say that ideas exist on a spectrum of novelty, with varying degrees of originality.
donatj 4y ago
That "1%" original is almost always just 1% uncited/unknown inspiration. If you listen to the stories of how things like major inventions came into being, it's almost always some domain expert visited some domain in which they were not an expert and inspiration struck on how to combine the domains. Otherwise, the rest of invention is either human imitations or improvements to things found in nature or not inventions at all but discoveries stumbled upon by accident/experimentation. Nothing is just willed into existence by pure "thought". Every thought you've had is a product of the things you've been surrounded by.
- dinkumthinkum 4y ago
  So Ramanujan with no formal training in mathematics was really surrounded by advanced education of mathematics and had no original ideas? I feel if more people studied philosophy they may discover how problematic these reductions are.
  - donatj 4y ago
    Math isn't a human invention at all. It's the discovery of the nature of the universe and an expression of the world around us.
    - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
      What does that even mean? Mathematical ideas are ideas. The notion of continued fractions is not just an expression of the world around us. This is basically hokum. The point is that human intelligence utilized original thoughts in the case of Ramanujan.
      - donatj 4y ago
        One of your three sheep is black. 1/3 - that's a fraction, a idealized representation of the real world. Now you take that concept and do it again over and over ad infinitum. That's not a magical invention that has no bearing on the world around us. That's just an expression of real world taken to its logical conclusion. It was not invented from a vacuum, it was invented from the input of the world around us. What is "hokum" is the idea that the human mind would somehow come up with meaningful output without meaningful input to seed it.
PurpleRamen 4y ago
> Philosophical food for thought: if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop? Somewhere around 2016, when the golden Age of Internet-Content ended, as the last undiscovered part was added to the mix... But jokes aside, does innovation really need to be new? Or would it still innovative if you don't know it when you create something you for you? Take for example all the retro-waves which regularly come back, where people discover something for them completely new, and make up some for them completely new things, which the generations for them already did long ago. > In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea" Does Original mean 100% new? And would it demand that all parts are new, or would it still original if we just arrange old parts in a new way?
krisoft 4y ago
> if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop? And the obvious answer of course is that recycling / mixing can be innovative and creative. The dichotomy only exists in our heads. I believe this is because of how our culture choose to reward intelectual output. Your output needs to appear sufficiently original to be worthy of reward and protection. For example a musician who creates a new song is not rewarded, in fact punished for naming all the influences they had coming in to said new song. (both morally, by people who would think less of them, and by lawsuits asking for a share of their profit.)
- dinkumthinkum 4y ago
  I feel like this heavily requires “citation needed”. There are plenty of these “inside the studio” type interviews where an artist describes at length their inspirations and the other artists they admired and wanted to mimic in some way.
  - telotortium 4y ago
    I think this is mostly referring to the Blurred Lines verdict. On the other hand, artists have a strong incentive to record their songwriting and recording process, so that they can head off any potential disputes about writing credits from people actually in the studio (this situation is statistically much more likely than somebody not involved suing after the song's release).
    - krisoft 4y ago
      > I think this is mostly referring to the Blurred Lines verdict. Interesting. I was mostly referring to the "Shake It Off" and the "Thinking Out Loud" copyright cases.
      - telotortium 4y ago
        The "Shake It Off" case seems like it involves lyrical content, which had always been a primary concern of music copyright, even before "Blurred Lines". The "Thinking Out Loud" case seems to involve similar issues to the "Blurred Lines" case, but was filed long after[1]: > While the Gaye family is not involved in the “Thinking Out Loud” lawsuits against Sheeran, the precedent set in their case looms over all new copyright infringement claims. Notably, the court took into account not just sheet music but studio arrangement too and ruled that “Blurred Lines” significantly aped the vibe of “Got to Give It Up,” something that had previously been beyond copyright protection. [1]: https://rollingstoneindia.com/copyright-infringement-lawsuit-over-ed-sheerans-thinking-out-loud-headed-to-trial/#:~:text=Six%20long%20years%20after%20Ed,ordered%20the%20case%20to%20trial https://rollingstoneindia.com/copyright-infringement-lawsuit....
krapp 4y ago
>In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea", then how did the ideas that we are pulling from, deriving from and combining come into existence? By observing nature, and then iterating on that over thousands of years of culture. Of course the question is whether and to what degree the process of iteration and transformation matters. How would you define an "original idea?" An idea with no origin or source, that spontaneously manifests from the aether? That isn't possible, everything must be extrapolated from something prior.
underyx 4y ago
I'd say it's possible that there have truly not been any original ideas, and the earliest human ideas might've been just remixing observed natural phenomena. What would muddy the waters there is that humans are complex organisms that in turn exhibit naturally complex behaviors both on an individual and a societal level. And there's even emotions that we feel due to our biology. But if you define all these as phenomena we observed about ourselves, I think my initial assertion still makes sense.
- dinkumthinkum 4y ago
  No true original ideas and there was just remixing natural phenomena? Really? So writing was just remixing all the writing that people saw volcanoes and rainstorms do?
  - underyx 4y ago
    I would advise reading allllllll the way till the second sentence in my comment.
  - rdlw 4y ago
    Writing was a remix of pictorial representation, which was a remix of the way things like ox heads, flowing water, and birds look.
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      >> No true original ideas and there was just remixing natural phenomena? Really? So writing was just remixing all the writing that people saw volcanoes and rainstorms do? > Writing was a remix of pictorial representation, which was a remix of the way things like ox heads, flowing water, and birds look. That's the kind of absurd reasoning when you take some proposition and try to defend it to the death even though its wrong.
      - rdlw 4y ago
        I'm not the one preserving the word 'remix' in this context, I just wanted to put it in the terms that GP was using. It certainly sounds more absurd when you use that word. But the point is that human creations are always based on something else, so pointing out that AI is basing its output on a database of previous work does not necessarily mean that it is not creating new art, or being creative, or however else you want to put it. It's like the ridiculous lawsuits that claim a song is stolen because it uses the same chord progression as an older song, where there are almost always centuries-old examples of that same progression from Beethoven et al. Your point seems to be that the reasoning is absurd because it's defending an incorrect premise, and the premise is obviously wrong because the reasoning is absurd, so I'm not you'll want to know what the people on the other side of this discussion think.
theK 4y ago
Creativity and innovation didn't ever stop. Its only words and concepts and we keep inventing new ones constantly. We also imbue new meaning to words and concepts over time.
- incrudible 4y ago
  Maybe they didn't stop, but they're converging towards zero. In the past hundred years, artists were coming up with a lot of things that had not existed for all of humanity. Nowadays, it's rare to find truly original style. The space has been explored thoroughly. It's also not just random search. It's no coincidence that most image generation prompts have an existing artist or style in them. If you leave it off, you just get crap.
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    >Maybe they didn't stop, but they're converging towards zero. In the past hundred years, artists were coming up with a lot of things that had not existed for all of humanity. How do you distinguish this from survivorship bias? There were probably tons of shitty artists 100 years ago but you haven't heard of them. > It's no coincidence that most image generation prompts have an existing artist or style in them. I've been thinking about this. I don't think it's evidence that anything is getting worse, because a lot of the prompts people use are referring to recent artists/styles. Is it possible that leaving out the style/artist leads to an average of every style which doesn't really work?
mock-possum 4y ago
Recycling / remixing content from the past *is* innovation and creativity.
lm28469 4y ago
> when did innovation and creativity stop? Or did it ever stop ?
glenstein 4y ago
I have had exactly this argument before and this has always been my issue with the claim. I recall people saying this about music when I was in college, an example I find especially frustrating because, per my friends argument, all contemporary music is influenced by, say, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, 'the greats' etc, and nothing new can truly be created in the shadow of these classics. It's nuts because it ignores all of human civilization up to that point, and doesn't give credit to people in the present day for being able to be original. But I think the way you have put it here is more clear than anything I've been able to manage. I think I put it in a more extreme form, which is to say that the earth had no life on it for ~3 billion years, and still no humans until ~100k years ago. At some point the first music was made. And if it could be original then, whatever it was that made that possible, should presumably make it possible now, too.
originalcopying 4y ago
it is like they say "there's nothing new under the sun, but maybe behind it?"
harpiaharpyja 4y ago
I think the simpler answer is that GP's assertion is just incorrect, and that humans regularly create genuinely original content.
spandrew 4y ago
"Why did innovation and creativity stop" because ideas are remixed is like saying when do the flowers stop blooming because the sun exists. The sun is an integral piece of why flowers grow. Read How to Ride a Bicycle. Human creativity is just a lot of work, often connecting novel ideas together while doing so.
hackerbrother 4y ago
There's nothin' you can do that can't be done Nothin' you can sing that can't be sung Nothin' you can say, but you can learn how to play the game It's easy Nothin' you can make that can't be made No one you can save that can't be saved Nothin' you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time It's easy All you need is love
- contemplatter 4y ago
  Great song, but isn't it just a derivative of songs that came before it? Nothing creative here.
pwpw 4y ago
Your comment immediately made me think of The Beatles. They are responsible for so many original things. They launched the album era and invented the concept album. They brought in entirely new instruments into rock music. They changed the culture around sexual expressiveness, and they introduced the western world to eastern philosophies. But when you start to scrutinize everything they did, there are many clear examples of things and people that did those things first and directly influenced them. However, they may have been the first to do it in their specific flavor, which is undoubtedly original. The most original thing I can think of that The Beatles did was add sound to the runoff track at the end of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, so that it keeps playing the sound infinitely until the needle is removed on the turntable. I’m sure someone with more insight can point to another musician doing that first, but at The Beatles’ scale, we collectively come to believe they were the first to do it.
roenxi 4y ago
That seems like a straightforward one; if humans are incapable of original thought then the original part probably came from sources that are not human and 'innovation' in the sense of 'an AI couldn't do this' never existed. We just need to make the AI better at interfacing with the real source of novelty - reality - than the current method of trying to interpret existing pictures on the internet. There will be a big leap forward when we get to teaching these things from video streams so they can get the concept of 3D properly.
satvikpendem 4y ago
> if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop? Your question contains the answer. Remixing begets innovation / creativity begets remixing.

blurbleblurble 4y ago

Combinatoric complexity blows up fast

decremental 4y ago

It's just something people say lazily in passing without giving much actual thought to why they're repeating what they saw somewhere else in a similar thread.

anonyfox 4y ago

I think this is purely a statistics problem. Like all breakthroughs are actually _discoveries_ of things that already do exist or mechanisms that can be exploited somehow. There is a huge amount of information flowing around us in realtime, and linking some thought/thing to something else, which then might have implications (subsequent discoveries) is statistics. We do have people with a better wetware so they have increased %chance do recognize something in front of them as well as linking it in a "novel way", but this is not really neccessary, it only increases %chances. Even pretty radical things can be explained this exact way, up to having some sort of brain "damage" (or drugs like LSD) that changes mental pathways and have a %chance to be actually right and lead to discoveries, but also the %chance here is very low. (not every trip is a breakthrough in art/science, right?)... a bit like iE people that can smell sounds or link some natural phenomenon with an emotional situation between some people and write about it. > peak human innovation that might simply a nonsense question if you follow my previous argument. there simply is no real "innovation" - only "discoveries" of stuff. and we meatbags with very limitied/unreliable wetware at some point can't "progress" any more, but non-biologically flawed systems might overcome our limitations and do just that for us. with our naked eyes, we cannot see things like infrared light, but it exists and some tools helped us to understand everything around it somewhat. now we're building more advanced tooling to get through the next plateaus - just like we have to build very sophisticated tooling to watch further into space or more closely into fractions of atoms, which in turn lead to more discoveries, and ultimately "innovation" we can feel in our lives. the only thing I will 100% agree to is that a real AGI will be the _last_ discovery/innovation humanity will ever make - and that is a good thing - it means we finally overcome our biological limits somewhat.

raincole 4y ago

The whole idea of "there is no such thing as an original idea" is utterly stupid. It's just a hyperbole and some people are taking it literally. Of course there are original ideas. "C is not an original idea, because it's just mixing A and B..." ok so there are only two possbilities: 1. Someone else did mixing A and B before. Okay then we can recursively find the first person who mixed A and B. 2. No one else did mixing A and B before. The "Mixing A and B" is a new idea. For some incomprehensible reasons, people seem to accept "mixing A and B is not a new idea because A and B already exist." Like... why? Since the four basic nucleobase existed, there haven't been any new DNA creatures? The real reason that it feels like there isn't new idea is simple: the "mixing" process happens gradually. Even if you come up with a really good "X + Z" idea, people (read: market) might not accept it because what they're familiar with is "X + Y". So you put a bit of Z to make "X + 0.9Y + 0.1Z", and another person who is as smart as you makes "X + 0.8Y + 0.2Z"... then when "X + Z" is officially a thing, people outside think you smart-ass guys were all just copying & pasting each other.

underyx 4y ago
In the context of this thread however, an AI mixing a randomly selected A and B makes it generate an idea that is just as original as a human's.
- raincole 4y ago
  I do believe AI sometimes generates an idea that is just as original as a human's. I don't believe originality is that valuable. It's a positive term to me, but just slightly. I've seen a lot people on HN credit the SV companies' "free food" practice to google. Do they believe free food for your employees is a new idea that someone in google came up with? I don't think so.
fsflover 4y ago
> 2. No one else did mixing A and B before. The "Mixing A and B" is a new idea. With such definition, GPT-4 can create new ideas.
- 4y ago

Method-X 4y ago

Yes, it's more accurate to say that ideas exist on a spectrum of novelty, with varying degrees of originality.

donatj 4y ago

That "1%" original is almost always just 1% uncited/unknown inspiration. If you listen to the stories of how things like major inventions came into being, it's almost always some domain expert visited some domain in which they were not an expert and inspiration struck on how to combine the domains. Otherwise, the rest of invention is either human imitations or improvements to things found in nature or not inventions at all but discoveries stumbled upon by accident/experimentation. Nothing is just willed into existence by pure "thought". Every thought you've had is a product of the things you've been surrounded by.

dinkumthinkum 4y ago
So Ramanujan with no formal training in mathematics was really surrounded by advanced education of mathematics and had no original ideas? I feel if more people studied philosophy they may discover how problematic these reductions are.
- donatj 4y ago
  Math isn't a human invention at all. It's the discovery of the nature of the universe and an expression of the world around us.
  - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
    What does that even mean? Mathematical ideas are ideas. The notion of continued fractions is not just an expression of the world around us. This is basically hokum. The point is that human intelligence utilized original thoughts in the case of Ramanujan.
    - donatj 4y ago
      One of your three sheep is black. 1/3 - that's a fraction, a idealized representation of the real world. Now you take that concept and do it again over and over ad infinitum. That's not a magical invention that has no bearing on the world around us. That's just an expression of real world taken to its logical conclusion. It was not invented from a vacuum, it was invented from the input of the world around us. What is "hokum" is the idea that the human mind would somehow come up with meaningful output without meaningful input to seed it.

PurpleRamen 4y ago

> Philosophical food for thought: if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop? Somewhere around 2016, when the golden Age of Internet-Content ended, as the last undiscovered part was added to the mix... But jokes aside, does innovation really need to be new? Or would it still innovative if you don't know it when you create something you for you? Take for example all the retro-waves which regularly come back, where people discover something for them completely new, and make up some for them completely new things, which the generations for them already did long ago. > In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea" Does Original mean 100% new? And would it demand that all parts are new, or would it still original if we just arrange old parts in a new way?

krisoft 4y ago

> if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop? And the obvious answer of course is that recycling / mixing can be innovative and creative. The dichotomy only exists in our heads. I believe this is because of how our culture choose to reward intelectual output. Your output needs to appear sufficiently original to be worthy of reward and protection. For example a musician who creates a new song is not rewarded, in fact punished for naming all the influences they had coming in to said new song. (both morally, by people who would think less of them, and by lawsuits asking for a share of their profit.)

dinkumthinkum 4y ago
I feel like this heavily requires “citation needed”. There are plenty of these “inside the studio” type interviews where an artist describes at length their inspirations and the other artists they admired and wanted to mimic in some way.
- telotortium 4y ago
  I think this is mostly referring to the Blurred Lines verdict. On the other hand, artists have a strong incentive to record their songwriting and recording process, so that they can head off any potential disputes about writing credits from people actually in the studio (this situation is statistically much more likely than somebody not involved suing after the song's release).
  - krisoft 4y ago
    > I think this is mostly referring to the Blurred Lines verdict. Interesting. I was mostly referring to the "Shake It Off" and the "Thinking Out Loud" copyright cases.
    - telotortium 4y ago
      The "Shake It Off" case seems like it involves lyrical content, which had always been a primary concern of music copyright, even before "Blurred Lines". The "Thinking Out Loud" case seems to involve similar issues to the "Blurred Lines" case, but was filed long after[1]: > While the Gaye family is not involved in the “Thinking Out Loud” lawsuits against Sheeran, the precedent set in their case looms over all new copyright infringement claims. Notably, the court took into account not just sheet music but studio arrangement too and ruled that “Blurred Lines” significantly aped the vibe of “Got to Give It Up,” something that had previously been beyond copyright protection. [1]: https://rollingstoneindia.com/copyright-infringement-lawsuit-over-ed-sheerans-thinking-out-loud-headed-to-trial/#:~:text=Six%20long%20years%20after%20Ed,ordered%20the%20case%20to%20trial https://rollingstoneindia.com/copyright-infringement-lawsuit....

krapp 4y ago

>In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea", then how did the ideas that we are pulling from, deriving from and combining come into existence? By observing nature, and then iterating on that over thousands of years of culture. Of course the question is whether and to what degree the process of iteration and transformation matters. How would you define an "original idea?" An idea with no origin or source, that spontaneously manifests from the aether? That isn't possible, everything must be extrapolated from something prior.

underyx 4y ago

I'd say it's possible that there have truly not been any original ideas, and the earliest human ideas might've been just remixing observed natural phenomena. What would muddy the waters there is that humans are complex organisms that in turn exhibit naturally complex behaviors both on an individual and a societal level. And there's even emotions that we feel due to our biology. But if you define all these as phenomena we observed about ourselves, I think my initial assertion still makes sense.

dinkumthinkum 4y ago
No true original ideas and there was just remixing natural phenomena? Really? So writing was just remixing all the writing that people saw volcanoes and rainstorms do?
- underyx 4y ago
  I would advise reading allllllll the way till the second sentence in my comment.
- rdlw 4y ago
  Writing was a remix of pictorial representation, which was a remix of the way things like ox heads, flowing water, and birds look.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    >> No true original ideas and there was just remixing natural phenomena? Really? So writing was just remixing all the writing that people saw volcanoes and rainstorms do? > Writing was a remix of pictorial representation, which was a remix of the way things like ox heads, flowing water, and birds look. That's the kind of absurd reasoning when you take some proposition and try to defend it to the death even though its wrong.
    - rdlw 4y ago
      I'm not the one preserving the word 'remix' in this context, I just wanted to put it in the terms that GP was using. It certainly sounds more absurd when you use that word. But the point is that human creations are always based on something else, so pointing out that AI is basing its output on a database of previous work does not necessarily mean that it is not creating new art, or being creative, or however else you want to put it. It's like the ridiculous lawsuits that claim a song is stolen because it uses the same chord progression as an older song, where there are almost always centuries-old examples of that same progression from Beethoven et al. Your point seems to be that the reasoning is absurd because it's defending an incorrect premise, and the premise is obviously wrong because the reasoning is absurd, so I'm not you'll want to know what the people on the other side of this discussion think.

theK 4y ago

Creativity and innovation didn't ever stop. Its only words and concepts and we keep inventing new ones constantly. We also imbue new meaning to words and concepts over time.

incrudible 4y ago
Maybe they didn't stop, but they're converging towards zero. In the past hundred years, artists were coming up with a lot of things that had not existed for all of humanity. Nowadays, it's rare to find truly original style. The space has been explored thoroughly. It's also not just random search. It's no coincidence that most image generation prompts have an existing artist or style in them. If you leave it off, you just get crap.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  >Maybe they didn't stop, but they're converging towards zero. In the past hundred years, artists were coming up with a lot of things that had not existed for all of humanity. How do you distinguish this from survivorship bias? There were probably tons of shitty artists 100 years ago but you haven't heard of them. > It's no coincidence that most image generation prompts have an existing artist or style in them. I've been thinking about this. I don't think it's evidence that anything is getting worse, because a lot of the prompts people use are referring to recent artists/styles. Is it possible that leaving out the style/artist leads to an average of every style which doesn't really work?

mock-possum 4y ago

Recycling / remixing content from the past *is* innovation and creativity.

lm28469 4y ago

> when did innovation and creativity stop? Or did it ever stop ?

glenstein 4y ago

I have had exactly this argument before and this has always been my issue with the claim. I recall people saying this about music when I was in college, an example I find especially frustrating because, per my friends argument, all contemporary music is influenced by, say, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, 'the greats' etc, and nothing new can truly be created in the shadow of these classics. It's nuts because it ignores all of human civilization up to that point, and doesn't give credit to people in the present day for being able to be original. But I think the way you have put it here is more clear than anything I've been able to manage. I think I put it in a more extreme form, which is to say that the earth had no life on it for ~3 billion years, and still no humans until ~100k years ago. At some point the first music was made. And if it could be original then, whatever it was that made that possible, should presumably make it possible now, too.

originalcopying 4y ago

it is like they say "there's nothing new under the sun, but maybe behind it?"

harpiaharpyja 4y ago

I think the simpler answer is that GP's assertion is just incorrect, and that humans regularly create genuinely original content.

spandrew 4y ago

"Why did innovation and creativity stop" because ideas are remixed is like saying when do the flowers stop blooming because the sun exists. The sun is an integral piece of why flowers grow. Read How to Ride a Bicycle. Human creativity is just a lot of work, often connecting novel ideas together while doing so.

hackerbrother 4y ago

There's nothin' you can do that can't be done Nothin' you can sing that can't be sung Nothin' you can say, but you can learn how to play the game It's easy Nothin' you can make that can't be made No one you can save that can't be saved Nothin' you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time It's easy All you need is love

contemplatter 4y ago
Great song, but isn't it just a derivative of songs that came before it? Nothing creative here.

pwpw 4y ago

Your comment immediately made me think of The Beatles. They are responsible for so many original things. They launched the album era and invented the concept album. They brought in entirely new instruments into rock music. They changed the culture around sexual expressiveness, and they introduced the western world to eastern philosophies. But when you start to scrutinize everything they did, there are many clear examples of things and people that did those things first and directly influenced them. However, they may have been the first to do it in their specific flavor, which is undoubtedly original. The most original thing I can think of that The Beatles did was add sound to the runoff track at the end of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, so that it keeps playing the sound infinitely until the needle is removed on the turntable. I’m sure someone with more insight can point to another musician doing that first, but at The Beatles’ scale, we collectively come to believe they were the first to do it.

roenxi 4y ago

That seems like a straightforward one; if humans are incapable of original thought then the original part probably came from sources that are not human and 'innovation' in the sense of 'an AI couldn't do this' never existed. We just need to make the AI better at interfacing with the real source of novelty - reality - than the current method of trying to interpret existing pictures on the internet. There will be a big leap forward when we get to teaching these things from video streams so they can get the concept of 3D properly.

satvikpendem 4y ago

> if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop? Your question contains the answer. Remixing begets innovation / creativity begets remixing.