Can AI be Creative?
I find this question coming up whenever I discuss AI with someone. We know that AI can do the repetitive tasks like taking meeting notes. AI can also summarize stuff, find answers to difficult questions, write computer programs, solve math problems, generate pictures, write poems and articles. But does this mean, AI is creative?
To really know this, we need to understand what creativity is. Is it something humans can own exclusively — like only an organic being can be creative? Or is creativity something more universal?
Creativity is bringing forth an idea that has never been thought of before. And how do we bring these ideas? There are two major factors here:
- To have enough packets of information that can be connected together to form a new set of information.
- The ability to connect as many packets of information as efficiently as possible to arrive at the most probable solution.
AI currently possesses the first quality. It has enough information from the corpus it has been fed to experiment with creativity. It is also efficient enough to connect many dots to arrive at the most probable outcome, although it is still not good enough to solve certain unsolved mysteries of the universe — which, by the way, humans are also struggling with.
I can ask a 10-year-old, who has limited information in her mind, to be creative. For example, I can ask her to paint something. With a shaky hand and unending curiosity, with eyes wide open, she can draw something where she connects her imaginations in her mind to the canvas in front of her. The outcome on the canvas would be a poor depiction of her imagination, and yet we will adore it and call the 10-year-old creative. Meanwhile, when AI produces a much more precise depiction of the instruction, we simply call it an algorithm. This is a bias we inherit as humans for humans and non-humans.
“Well, how can we not adore a 10-year-old’s painting? She is, of course, creative — we all have been through that. Our unending imaginations and attentions. But AI, it’s just a computer algorithm, following instructions without much thought, imagination, or feeling.” Maybe that’s what’s going through our minds.
Let me stretch a bit further before coming back to explore what the real difference between humans and AI is.
As a second example, imagine a crow. We often marvel at the intelligence of the crow, as illustrated in Aesop’s fable “The Crow and the Pitcher,” where the crow gets water from a glass by throwing stones into it.
So, let’s ask AI:
Well, we marvel at the creativity of the crow, but not so much at the AI — just a machine spitting out information. Perhaps it’s already fed a corpus of Aesop’s fables, and it is just repeating the information.
We can stretch this a bit more. Perhaps the AI knew it was just rewriting information from Aesop’s fable. That wouldn’t bring much rigor to the second condition of creativity we have laid out above. So, let’s stretch it with a new prompt to force it to be more creative.
What do you think? Does AI fulfill the definition of creativity now? If the crow had followed the above suggestions, how intelligent would we call that crow?
A recent paper published by Google in Nature highlights the capacity of AI to solve an unsolved mathematical problem: Mathematical discoveries from program search with large language models | Nature
(Here is a more readable version: Google DeepMind used a large language model to solve an unsolved math problem | MIT Technology Review)
This shows that AI is indeed fulfilling the two axioms of creativity we have established above. The limits of creativity can be stretched even further as AI is fed with more information, better algorithms, and greater computing power.
AI is still far behind human intelligence because humans have much more access to information than AI does. Of course, AI has the entire encyclopedia of contents at its neural tips, but humans have much broader day-to-day trial-and-error experiences. We have senses that can see, hear, feel, smell, and taste. We experience success and failure as we stumble through life. From this experience, we can make some decisive choices that may not always be optimal. If AI had all these experiences, I believe that even with its current capabilities, it could make very decisive, unbiased choices.
CEOs like Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Bob Iger of Disney are known to turnaround the company whenever they return to the companies. They are capable of risking billions of dollars to introduce new products or change the strategy of a company, and many of those choices are intuitive and made in a split second. This comes from their rich experience of the world, along with, of course, the right set of algorithms and hardware in their minds.
Now, if AI can be as capable as humans, given the right experience (information), algorithms, and hardware, what is it that differentiates humans from AI?
I find it best articulated in the book ‘Allies of Humanity’:
Knowledge enables you to think in any number of ways, to act spontaneously, to perceive reality beyond the obvious and to experience the future and the past. Such abilities are beyond the reach of those who can only follow the regimens and the dictates of their cultures. You are far behind the visitors technologically, but you have the promise to develop skills in The Way of Knowledge, skills which you will need and must learn to rely upon increasingly.
— Allies of Humanity, Book 1
Notice “The regimens and dictates of the culture”, AI is always bound by that as humans are. AI is always tied to an algorithm, a neural network. But humans have an opening, an opening that in the book, the Allies calls Knowledge, an opening that’s not bound by thoughts or algorithms.
This would be out of reach for many, as we, like AI, are also living within the algorithm of social and cultural expectations. But those who are taking the Way of Knowledge are open to experiencing many things that would appear much more superstitious if I talk too much about them. Minds are connected to each other through mental environments, and the mind is also connected to a deeper intelligence that is capable of communicating with those who can hear.
AI, on the other hand, is not invisibly connected to another AI yet, nor does it have a deeper knowledge within that it can listen to and take heed of. This makes humans sentient beings, spiritual beings with a deep connection to our innate source, regardless of our beliefs and associations.
