AI singer-songwriter ‘Anna Indiana’ debuted her first single ‘Betrayed by this Town’ on X, formerly Twitter—and listeners were not too impressed.
AI singer-songwriter ‘Anna Indiana’ debuted her first single ‘Betrayed by this Town’ on X, formerly Twitter—and listeners were not too impressed.
The human imagination also involves the phenomenal experience. You do not just record the data coming at you and regurgitate it, you experience it and then your experience further changes the data itself. We call this “subjectivity” and it’s where creativity comes from.
I am not saying that machine creativity is impossible. What I’m saying is these LLMs are not creative because they don’t even know what they’re doing and they don’t even know “they” are doing it. There’s no “there” there. No more creative than rolling dice.
and experience is ongoing learning, so if an LLM were training on things after the pretraining period then that’d allow it to be creative in your definition?
but in that case, what’s the difference between doing that all at once, and doing it over a period of time?
experience is just tweaking your neurons to make new/different connections
This. Humans are just meat calculators when you zoom out.
Experience is ongoing learning through the subjective self. When you experience the color red you do not just record it with your photoreceptors, and your experience of the color red is different from mine because we don’t just record wavelengths of light. We don’t just continue to learn from continual exposure to new data, we also continue to learn from generating our own data. In this way our subjective experience is qualitative, not simply quantitative. I don’t just see the specific light wavelengths, I experience the “redness” of red.
When LLM is trained on that kind of data it just starts to hallucinate. This is promising! I think the hallucination phenomenon is actually a precursor to creativity and gives us great insights into the nature of subjective experience. In a sense, my phenomenal experience of the color red is actually much like a hallucination where I am also able to experience the color’s “warmth” and “boldness”. Subjectivity.
it’s only qualitative because we don’t understand it
when an LLM “experiences” new data via training, that’s subjective too: it works its way through the network in a manner that’s different depending on what came before it… if different training data came before it, the network would look differently and the data would change the network as a whole in a different way
When an LLM feeds on its own outputs, though, it quickly starts to hallucinate. I think this is actually closer to creativity, but it betrays the fundamental flaw behind the technology - it does not think about its own thoughts and requires a curator to help it create.
I’ll believe something is an AI when it can be its own curator and not drive itself insane.
that’s a lack of understanding of concepts though, rather than a lack of creativity… curation requires that you understand the concept that you’re trying to curate: this looks more like a dog than this; this is a more attractive sunset than this
current LLMs and ML don’t understand concepts, which is their main issue
id argue that it kind of does “think about its own thoughts” to some degree: modern ML is layered, and each layer of the net feeds into the next… one layer of the net “thinks about” the “thoughts” of the previous layer. now, it doesn’t do this as a whole but neither do we: memories and neural connections are lossy; heck even creating a creative work isn’t going to turn out exactly like you thought it in your head (your muscle memory and skill level will effect the translation from brain to paper/canvas/screen)
but even we hallucinate in the same way. don’t look at a bike, and then try and draw a bike… you’ll get general things like pedals, wheels, seat, handlebars, but it’ll be all connected wrong. this is a common example people use to show how our brains aren’t as precise and we might like to think… drawing a bike requires a lot of very specific things to be in very specific places and that’s not how our brain remembers the concept of “bike”
This is a relevant issue to the question!
If I take a dose of LSD and paint the colors I hallucinate, is that creative? I’d argue it’s not.
Only when I, the subjective self, curate my own thoughts and sensations can I engage in a creative process. I can think about my own thoughts without going insane (how do the colors make me feel, what do the colors mean?) and that’s a fundamental part of creativity and intelligence. Conceptualization is key to subjectivity.
I don’t think this is far off. I just don’t think we’re there, either, and we should be skeptical of marketing hype.
i don’t agree with that definition of creative… there’s lots of engineering work that’s creative: writing code and designing systems can be a very creative process, but doesn’t involve feeling… it’s problem solving, and thats a creative process. you’re narrowly defining creativity as artistic expression of emotion, however there’s lots of ways to be creative
now, i think thats a bit of a strawman (so i’ll elaborate on the broader point), but i think its important to define terms
i agree we should be skeptical of marketing hype for sure: the type of creativity that i believe ML is currently capable of is directionless. it doesn’t understand what it’s creating… but the truth lies somewhere in the middle
ML is definitively creating something new that didn’t exist before (in fact i’d say that its trouble with hallucinations of language are a good example of that: it certainly didn’t copy those characters/words from anywhere!)… this fits the easiest definition of creative: marked by the ability or power to create
the far more difficult definition is: having the quality of something created rather than imitated
the key here being “rather than imitated” which is a really hard thing to prove, even for humans! which is why our copyright laws basically say that if you have evidence that you created something first, you pretty much win: we don’t really try to decide whether something was created or imitated
with things like transformative works or things that are similar, it’s a bit more of a grey area… but the argument isn’t about whether something is an imitation; rather it’s argued about how different the work is from the original
The same could be said of a lot of creatives. You speak of greater creativity, that which evokes depth and gravity. There is still more shallow creativity. Learning creativity. That which you do before you learn to do better. Kind of what these are doing.
I’m not saying it’s good or bad, though the people who hold the reigns definitely don’t have the best intentions for their use, but underestimating it is the first step to allowing them to run rampant.
“Never attribute to malice that which you can attribute to stupidity” is the slogan of those who do nothing but look down on others… who underestimate the horrible things the “stupid” can do. Don’t assume stupidity just because you don’t like something. It makes it that much easier for it to bite you on the ass in the future.
I don’t think I’d actually call that shallow thought “creativity”.
Think of a word association game. I don’t think the first word that pops up in my head is creative at all, it’s just a thoughtless reaction.
That’s what LLMs are doing. Without that reflection and depth it’s just a direct input->output