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> This is often overlooked by those computer scientists who correctly point out that it is not impossible for computers to demonstrate creativity. Not impossib

> This is often overlooked by those computer scientists who correctly point out that it is not impossible for computers to demonstrate creativity. Not impossible, yes. Likely enough to warrant belief in a computer can pass the Turing Test? In my opinion, no. I never understand this creativity argument against AI. How is creativity different than adding some randomness to the answer generating? I would say that computers are perfectly capable of that.

DrStormyDaniels 3y ago
It’s interesting. Creativity might not be different in effect to “adding some randomness”, but it is different in cause. If the effect is indistinguishable, this distinction may seem sentimental. But take the idea to its limit. If an A.I. told you that it loved you, that would be practically different as a mere effect of added randomness than as an expression of a cause. A piece of text stripped of human context is no different than one made by a bona-fide human. But language without human context, would not be human. Two people saying the exact same thing may have entirely different meanings. Etc. And of course, this is still extremely abstract. People aren’t “contexts”.
michaelt 3y ago
> How is creativity different than adding some randomness to the answer generating? Well, that puts you pretty deep into questions of the philosophy of art, the inner workings of AI, and what the person was predicting about those things when they wrote it. If I train an art-generating ML model exclusively on pictures of cats and dogs, we might expect it to only be able to generate pictures of cats, dogs, and perhaps cat-dog hybrids. In a sense it's able to create things outside of the bounds of the training set, as there were no cat-dog hybrids in the training set. But in another sense, it's unable to create things outside those bounds, as it can't create pictures of horses or astronauts. Some would say the latter is needed for true creativity, boundless possibilities being a defining property of art. In the case of current image generating ML models, their training set wasn't limited to cats and dogs - but it was limited to the art you could scrape from the web in ~2022. And of course Kapoor was writing this in 2002, so was presumably judging the artfulness of a hypothetical image generation system.
henry_pulver 3y ago
> How is creativity different than adding some randomness to the answer generating? Deterministic systems are clearly not creative. But randomness is a necessary, but not sufficient, requirement for creativity. Adding random noise to an image makes it grainy (like TV static from back in the day), it doesn't lead to new masterpieces.
jmopp 3y ago
There's a difference between creativity and initiative. Aleatoric music has been a thing for over 200 years. But you still need a human to roll the dice, as it were. I would like to see a computer do something unprompted before I am sold on AI being creative

DrStormyDaniels 3y ago

It’s interesting. Creativity might not be different in effect to “adding some randomness”, but it is different in cause. If the effect is indistinguishable, this distinction may seem sentimental. But take the idea to its limit. If an A.I. told you that it loved you, that would be practically different as a mere effect of added randomness than as an expression of a cause. A piece of text stripped of human context is no different than one made by a bona-fide human. But language without human context, would not be human. Two people saying the exact same thing may have entirely different meanings. Etc. And of course, this is still extremely abstract. People aren’t “contexts”.

michaelt 3y ago

> How is creativity different than adding some randomness to the answer generating? Well, that puts you pretty deep into questions of the philosophy of art, the inner workings of AI, and what the person was predicting about those things when they wrote it. If I train an art-generating ML model exclusively on pictures of cats and dogs, we might expect it to only be able to generate pictures of cats, dogs, and perhaps cat-dog hybrids. In a sense it's able to create things outside of the bounds of the training set, as there were no cat-dog hybrids in the training set. But in another sense, it's unable to create things outside those bounds, as it can't create pictures of horses or astronauts. Some would say the latter is needed for true creativity, boundless possibilities being a defining property of art. In the case of current image generating ML models, their training set wasn't limited to cats and dogs - but it was limited to the art you could scrape from the web in ~2022. And of course Kapoor was writing this in 2002, so was presumably judging the artfulness of a hypothetical image generation system.

henry_pulver 3y ago

> How is creativity different than adding some randomness to the answer generating? Deterministic systems are clearly not creative. But randomness is a necessary, but not sufficient, requirement for creativity. Adding random noise to an image makes it grainy (like TV static from back in the day), it doesn't lead to new masterpieces.

jmopp 3y ago

There's a difference between creativity and initiative. Aleatoric music has been a thing for over 200 years. But you still need a human to roll the dice, as it were. I would like to see a computer do something unprompted before I am sold on AI being creative