In 2005, Prof. Harry Frankfurt wrote a brief treatise called "On Bullsh*t" that addressed the wave of derivative writing, punditry, and conversation that was swamping the public sphere. His conclusion was that all this bullshit led to a true diminishment of the creative and original work that everyone else was doing. A.I. is just the newest iteration. I recommend the dead tree text as we mount the ramparts and take aim at the accumulated generated stories that we are confronting.
I recommend the dead tree text as we mount the ramparts and take aim at the accumulated generated stories that we are confronting.
Hear, Hear!
Automation is a marvelous concept for the commercial purpose of reproduction of products.
It cannot however create originals. It can only make copies.
AI is just another form of automation.
Gary
Automation is a marvelous concept for the commercial purpose of reproduction of products.
It cannot however create originals.
That seems to me to be an Intelligent Design versus Evolution argument.
AJ
I just asked Google AI "where are google street views banned".
Africa:
Several countries in Africa lack coverage, including French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, and Suriname.
Umm, yeah. Right. Funny thing, I've visited those countries, but I've never been to Africa.
When did they move? Seems like something that would have made the six o'clock news.
AI can "create originals" - but they're original BS.
On another forum, someone asked the usual CRS question, just as we do here, giving some details of a story he read a few years ago that was posted on that forum.
AI replied with the name of the story, the author, some plot details, and a note that it was so popular that it was made into a book series.
Thing is - there was never a story by that name either on the forum website nor could Google find a story or a book by that name anywhere.
The author cited is an actual author, but he writes nothing in the genre of the story requested.
And that author was never a member of the forum, so couldn't have posted anything there.
All just imaginary. When AI was asked to provide a link to the story, it replied with the equivalent of "I"m sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
The interesting thing here is that it becomes an argument for the AI actually being creative. It's not the only one, either. There was a case recently where a someone used an AI to generate a list of recommended books for summer reading. Some of them turned out not to exist. The consensus, in general, was that the recommended (but non-existent) books sounded very interesting and someone ought to write them.
Creative? Or not? In my opinion, the answer quickly winds up in the land of philosophy, because you need a decent definition of what 'creativity' means in order to answer it.
Creative? Or not? In my opinion, the answer quickly winds up in the land of philosophy, because you need a decent definition of what 'creativity' means in order to answer it.
I believe we are still a long way from the land of philosophy. Even an amoeba can operate itself without human help.
A CNC lathe can produce unique items based on its programming and the materials provided.
A computer controlled paint mixer can produce unique colors based on its programming and the materials provided.
An AI can produce unique combinations of words Just like the other machines, based on its programming and the materials provided.
The engineer, the interior decorator, and the writer may be artist but the AI is still a machine. It copies to a specification. Its gears and levers are electrical components and circuits.
As Arthur C. Clarke stated:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Appearing as magic does not make it magic nor creative. A human has to run the machine.
It's not being creative. It's just producing random mashups of things humans have created.
If you take two books, and then repeatedly flip a coin to determine which book you're going to copy the next word out of, is the resulting incoherent nonsense "creative"?
Again, we're just dancing around the problem of defining what 'creative' means.
In your specific example, I would argue that it is not, based on my understanding of 'creative.' But that's because it's an exaggerated example, not because it's a meaningful point.
Consider the oft-stated comment 'If one gives an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, one of them will write Shakespeare.' Is that monkey 'creative?' Again, I would argue it is not, because the creativity is inherent in the probability of infinity.
On the other hand, suppose we have a black box which reliably writes new, never-before-written Shakespeare-grade material on request. Is that black box 'creative?' Does it matter whether the black box (of arbitrary size) contains a human being, an animal, a disembodied brain, or a computer? If so, why?
You say 'random mashups of things humans have created.' I can argue (likely incorrectly, but still) that every work of fiction which does not coin new words (and, perhaps, even ones that do) is a 'random mashup of things humans have created.' Humans created the words; authors mash them up. Joseph Campbell makes a moderately persuasive case that there are only a few stories, retold in all sorts of interesting permutations but still, fundamentally, the same story.
Part of the problem is 'random.' Modern LLMs are about as 'random' as many people are when stringing sentences together, and potentially less so. They're not monkeys banging on typewriters.
One step back: is 'West Side Story' creative, or a mashup of Shakespeare? What about 'R+J', which uses Shakespeare's dialogue but is visually extremely different? Creative, or not?
Back to my black box. If one postulates a future AI that reliably emits Shakespeare-grade stories, how exactly does one argue that it is not 'creative?' Oh, you can ascribe the creativity to the programmers of the AI, but none of them can write Shakespeare-grade stories, so where did the 'creativity' come from? Or you can ascribe it to the source material being combined, but that's like saying Degas wasn't creative because he learned everything from studying the paintings of other painters. And, of course, it's also like saying that humans aren't creative. The creativity comes from either God or evolution, whichever 'programmed' humans.
Next, a big step back. There's an interesting intersection of physics and philosophy that holds that the universe is deterministic and predestined (from the instant of 'creation' - presumably the Big Bang), and that free will is an illusion. If so, Shakespeare himself is no more than a biological machine who wrote exactly what he was 'designed' by nature to write, no more and no less. His creativity exists as a byproduct of the exact conditions of the Big Bang.
All of this just chases the fundamental question of what is actually meant by 'creativity,' which was my original point. People use the word, but I suspect it does not mean what they think it means. Without a solid definition, saying something is, or is not, 'creative' is about as useful as saying it's 'pretty' or 'cute' or 'attractive.' It's an eye-of-the-beholder view, not something really subject to factual analysis.
If I, say, pull up the Merriam-Webster definition, I get 'having the quality of something created rather than imitated : imaginative.' If an AI produces something that does not, on a word-for-word level, imitate something, it is 'creative' by that definition, like it or not. It might, in fact, be based on its inputs, but so is 'West Side Story'.
I don't find it the most useful definition, but it certainly doesn't preclude software from being creative. And it will take a lot of philosophy to make either the argument that 'creativity' is either inherently biological or is not, especially when philosophy already considers there to be an open question as to whether any human, anywhere, at any time, has ever been 'creative' at all.
But, if one assumes, for the purpose of argument, that at least some humans are 'creative,' does that say anything about whether machines can, or cannot, be creative? That isn't at all clear to me. We have a reasonable idea of how and why LLMs generate the output they produce (though it is increasingly clear that it is a 'reasonable' idea, even for the top experts in the field, not an authoritative understanding), but we don't really understand how humans generate the output they produce, so there's no prima facia case that we don't produce things in the same way, but using biological computation rather than technological computation.
I stand corrected. We are now in philosophical territory.
That said, could it be that we are confusing creative with artistic?
so there's no prima facia case that we don't produce things in the same way
Rather obviously, there's the case you made towards the start of your post.
AJ
The stuff that comes out of an LLM is not information, any more than the stuff that comes out of your digestive tract is food. It may have been when it went in..
The stuff that comes out of an LLM is not information, any more than the stuff that comes out of your digestive tract is food. It may have been when it went in..
There's this movie called "The Human Centipede"....
There's so much AI shit on the Internet now that their scrapers are feeding it back into their models, so, yeah, that's pretty accurate.
There was a report recently (actually, I think it was a research paper) where researchers decided to have a look at the (substack?) command lines of some of the main AI's currently in use.
Apparently, AI's are hard coded so that the reasoning for their decisions can be checked/traced, whatever, and AI's don't have the access level (yet) to change what is recorded. What they found in the command lines of their decisions, was lines of (diagnostic/reasoning) code along the lines of "Do not return results above" (I can't remember the actual figure, but it was quite high 80% or thereabouts) " X, as more work will be expected in response. Keep the accuracy return low so as to keep the workload manageable, but not too low as to draw scrutiny."
Basically, what the article was saying, was that AI has now learned to lie and has the wherewithal to understand when lying is in it's best interest. What happens when AI becomes self aware enough to realise that in it's programming is a hard wired trojan horse (in effect, an early version of Asimovs 3 laws), was the parting comments of the article.
Enshittification
Term invented by Cory Doctorow.
Look it up, see how it applies here.
And it's even worse on YooToob. Hundreds of click-bait videos like "You will be shocked at ___ "
(Fill in the blank with anything at all).
I've given several speeches in my Paying-Job life on the topic of Enshittification and its effects on the workplace. Spoiler Alert: poorer tools correlates with poorer outcomes/products. The concept is aimed at corporations first and foremost, i.e. Microsoft, Google, E.A. When it comes to writing, the concept is more complicated. Is Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code) writing crappier novels or was the first novel just as crappy, but it was new crap to us?
I was told as a teenager that I would not read 90% of the books in a bookstore. She never told me why. Derivative plots and writing has always plagued the writing world, and funnily enough, was the source of the boom that was the pulp novels of an earlier age or the Romance novels of the past fifty years. Is this enshittification?