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> the main argument against automating these tasks was that machines can’t think creatively. Now this argument gets weaker by the day. Citation needed.

dartos 3y ago
I mean it’s definitely a weaker argument than 2 years ago. AI may very well plateau, but it might not.
- couchand 3y ago
  > I mean it’s definitely a weaker argument than 2 years ago. Is it? I see no evidence that machines are any closer to "thinking creatively" than they ever have been. We certainly have been developing our capacity for computation to a great extent, but it's not at all evident that statistical methods and creativity are the same thing.
  - throwaway_08932 3y ago
    A practical definition of "creativity" is "can create interesting things." It's pretty clear that machines have become more "creative" in that sense over the last few years.
    - boxed 3y ago
      I have yet to see ChatGPT or something similar ask a followup to clarify the question. They just give you a "solution". That's equivalent of a super bad junior dev that will cause more trouble than the amount they will solve. That being said, I think we could make such a system. It just has to have training data that is competent...
      - simonw 3y ago
        Tell them to ask you follow up questions and they will. Some systems built on top of LLMs have this built in - Perplexity searches for example usually ask a follow up before running the search. I find it a bit annoying because it feels like about half the time the follow up it asks me isn't necessary to answer my original question.
        boxed 3y ago
        > Tell them to ask you follow up questions and they will. That's rather missing the point. If your question makes no sense it will not ask a followup, it will spit out garbage. This is pretty bad. If you are competent enough to ask it to ask for followup then you are probably already competent enough to either not need the tool, or competent enough to ask a good question.
      - Workaccount2 3y ago
        I have had chatGPT suggest that I give it more data/information pretty regularly. Although not technically a question, it essentially accomplishes the same thing. "If you give me this" vs. "Can you give me this?"
      - theshackleford 3y ago
        > I have yet to see ChatGPT or something similar ask a followup to clarify the question. I don’t use it for dev, but other things and I get chatgpt asking me follow up questions multiple times a day.
  - imiric 3y ago
    This point is often brought up in threads about AI, and I don't think it's accurate. The thing is that statistical models only need to be fed large amounts of data for them to exhibit what humans would refer to as "creativity", or "thinking" for that matter. The process a human uses to express their creativity is also based on training and the input of other humans, with the difference that it's spread out over years instead of hours, and is a much more organic process. AI can easily fake creativity by making its output indistinguishable from its training data, and as long as it's accurate and useful, it would hold immense value to humanity. This has been improving drastically in the last few years, so arguing that they're not _really_ thinking creatively doesn't hold much water.
  - pegasus 3y ago
    > is it? It is. And I bet most people would agree with GP. Most people (including engineers building these systems) have experienced surprise with some of the outputs of these models. Is there anything better to gauge creativity by than perceived surprise?
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > Is there anything better to gauge creativity by than perceived surprise? I think there has to be, since such surprise can be generated through purely random mechanisms, and I don't think anyone would call a purely random mechanism "creative".
      - brabel 3y ago
        If it were purely random it would generate rubbish.
        JohnFen 3y ago
        Not necessarily, but even in the cases where that's true, there will be the occasional result that surprises (in a good way).
        kevindamm 3y ago
        This reminds me of when I would be surprised by AI bots I coded up for video games. Yeah, sometimes they beat me, and their strategies were often a mix of RNG and heuristics so I was certainly surprised by their behavior on many occasions. But would I consider them creative? No. Would they fool some people into thinking they had creativity and agency? Sure.
  - dartos 3y ago
    I can ask my computer to write a backstory for my dnd character, give it a few details, and it makes one. Sometimes it adds an extra detail or two even! A few years ago that was almost unthinkable. The best we had was arithmetic over abstract language concepts (KING - MAN = QUEEN) We don’t have a solid definition of “creativity” so the goalpost can move around a lot, but the idea that a machine can not create new prose, for example, is just not true anymore. That’s not the same as creativity, sure, but it definitely weakens the “computers can’t be creative” argument.
    - kevindamm 3y ago
      actually, KING - MAN is a neuter ruler. You need to add WOMAN to that vector to get QUEEN. Sometimes. If the embeddings were trained well.
- Hoasi 3y ago
  Not really. Large language models' output is creative only insofar as you prompt them to mix data. It allows you to create combinations that nobody has seen before. On its own, an LLM is incapable of producing anything creative. Hallucinating due to a lack of data is the closer it comes to autonomous creativity. Happy accidents are an unreliable creativity source. This type of creativity is amusing but doesn't solve any existing problem today.
  - taco-hands 3y ago
    There's a simple irony in it all. AI's perceived value is based upon and built from human creativity - remove it (and its evolution) and it will end in grey/brown sludge.
ks2048 3y ago
One of the ironies of current generative AIs and LLMs - they are creative, but need human supervision to watch for simple logical errors. Just the reverse of conventional way of looking at humans vs machines.
RALaBarge 3y ago
To me, I think the end game for any code developing automation isn't that it needs to be creative to program, but.. A: needs to have a close to complete understanding of the problem to solve and the tools they have in languages to complete this in the most efficient way and.. B: need to be able to iterate through all of the different options it can generate and run `perf` or what have you on the outcomes of each and present the top few winners AGI might not be a thing we can make, but if we can make enough semi-intelligent AIs communicating via a standardized format that are each 95% right on their respective domain we might be at a level that is good enough. Add in for critical domains some sort of polling that is done between a few admin AIs to make sure the winning results are not a hallucination.

dartos 3y ago

I mean it’s definitely a weaker argument than 2 years ago. AI may very well plateau, but it might not.

couchand 3y ago
> I mean it’s definitely a weaker argument than 2 years ago. Is it? I see no evidence that machines are any closer to "thinking creatively" than they ever have been. We certainly have been developing our capacity for computation to a great extent, but it's not at all evident that statistical methods and creativity are the same thing.
- throwaway_08932 3y ago
  A practical definition of "creativity" is "can create interesting things." It's pretty clear that machines have become more "creative" in that sense over the last few years.
  - boxed 3y ago
    I have yet to see ChatGPT or something similar ask a followup to clarify the question. They just give you a "solution". That's equivalent of a super bad junior dev that will cause more trouble than the amount they will solve. That being said, I think we could make such a system. It just has to have training data that is competent...
    - simonw 3y ago
      Tell them to ask you follow up questions and they will. Some systems built on top of LLMs have this built in - Perplexity searches for example usually ask a follow up before running the search. I find it a bit annoying because it feels like about half the time the follow up it asks me isn't necessary to answer my original question.
      - boxed 3y ago
        > Tell them to ask you follow up questions and they will. That's rather missing the point. If your question makes no sense it will not ask a followup, it will spit out garbage. This is pretty bad. If you are competent enough to ask it to ask for followup then you are probably already competent enough to either not need the tool, or competent enough to ask a good question.
    - Workaccount2 3y ago
      I have had chatGPT suggest that I give it more data/information pretty regularly. Although not technically a question, it essentially accomplishes the same thing. "If you give me this" vs. "Can you give me this?"
    - theshackleford 3y ago
      > I have yet to see ChatGPT or something similar ask a followup to clarify the question. I don’t use it for dev, but other things and I get chatgpt asking me follow up questions multiple times a day.
- imiric 3y ago
  This point is often brought up in threads about AI, and I don't think it's accurate. The thing is that statistical models only need to be fed large amounts of data for them to exhibit what humans would refer to as "creativity", or "thinking" for that matter. The process a human uses to express their creativity is also based on training and the input of other humans, with the difference that it's spread out over years instead of hours, and is a much more organic process. AI can easily fake creativity by making its output indistinguishable from its training data, and as long as it's accurate and useful, it would hold immense value to humanity. This has been improving drastically in the last few years, so arguing that they're not _really_ thinking creatively doesn't hold much water.
- pegasus 3y ago
  > is it? It is. And I bet most people would agree with GP. Most people (including engineers building these systems) have experienced surprise with some of the outputs of these models. Is there anything better to gauge creativity by than perceived surprise?
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Is there anything better to gauge creativity by than perceived surprise? I think there has to be, since such surprise can be generated through purely random mechanisms, and I don't think anyone would call a purely random mechanism "creative".
    - brabel 3y ago
      If it were purely random it would generate rubbish.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        Not necessarily, but even in the cases where that's true, there will be the occasional result that surprises (in a good way).
        kevindamm 3y ago
        This reminds me of when I would be surprised by AI bots I coded up for video games. Yeah, sometimes they beat me, and their strategies were often a mix of RNG and heuristics so I was certainly surprised by their behavior on many occasions. But would I consider them creative? No. Would they fool some people into thinking they had creativity and agency? Sure.
- dartos 3y ago
  I can ask my computer to write a backstory for my dnd character, give it a few details, and it makes one. Sometimes it adds an extra detail or two even! A few years ago that was almost unthinkable. The best we had was arithmetic over abstract language concepts (KING - MAN = QUEEN) We don’t have a solid definition of “creativity” so the goalpost can move around a lot, but the idea that a machine can not create new prose, for example, is just not true anymore. That’s not the same as creativity, sure, but it definitely weakens the “computers can’t be creative” argument.
  - kevindamm 3y ago
    actually, KING - MAN is a neuter ruler. You need to add WOMAN to that vector to get QUEEN. Sometimes. If the embeddings were trained well.
Hoasi 3y ago
Not really. Large language models' output is creative only insofar as you prompt them to mix data. It allows you to create combinations that nobody has seen before. On its own, an LLM is incapable of producing anything creative. Hallucinating due to a lack of data is the closer it comes to autonomous creativity. Happy accidents are an unreliable creativity source. This type of creativity is amusing but doesn't solve any existing problem today.
- taco-hands 3y ago
  There's a simple irony in it all. AI's perceived value is based upon and built from human creativity - remove it (and its evolution) and it will end in grey/brown sludge.

ks2048 3y ago

One of the ironies of current generative AIs and LLMs - they are creative, but need human supervision to watch for simple logical errors. Just the reverse of conventional way of looking at humans vs machines.

RALaBarge 3y ago

To me, I think the end game for any code developing automation isn't that it needs to be creative to program, but.. A: needs to have a close to complete understanding of the problem to solve and the tools they have in languages to complete this in the most efficient way and.. B: need to be able to iterate through all of the different options it can generate and run `perf` or what have you on the outcomes of each and present the top few winners AGI might not be a thing we can make, but if we can make enough semi-intelligent AIs communicating via a standardized format that are each 95% right on their respective domain we might be at a level that is good enough. Add in for critical domains some sort of polling that is done between a few admin AIs to make sure the winning results are not a hallucination.