Technology

How is that the implication?

Inspiration is something we do through conscious experience. Just because some statistical analysis of a word cloud can produce sentences that trick a casual observer into thinking a person wrote them doesn’t make it a creative process.

In fact, I can prove to you that (so-called) AI can never be creative.

To get an AI to do anything, we have to establish a goal to measure against. You have to quantify it.

If you tell a human being “this is what it means to be creative; we have an objective measure of it”, do you know what they tend to do? They say “fuck your definition” and try to make something that breaks the rules in an interesting way. That’s the entire history of art.

You can even see that playing out with respect to AI. Artists going “You say AI art can’t be art, so I’m gonna enter AI pieces and see if you can even tell.”

That’s a creative act. But it’s not creative because of what the AI is doing. Much like Duchamp’s urinal wasn’t a creative object, but the act of signing it R Mutt and submitting it to a show was.

The kinds of AIs we design right now will never have a transformative R Mutt moment, because they are fundamentally bounded by their training. They would have to be trained to use novel input to dismantle and question their training (and have that change stick around), but even that training would then become another method of imitation that they could not escape. They can’t question quantification itself, because they are just quantitative processes — nothing more than word calculators.