AI can't create anything new, but neither can we? Hear me out

Question

I keep seeing comments online saying AI, especially generative models, are just fancy summarizers. They feed on humanity's past works, and once that runs out, they'll be stuck in a loop, churning out derivative junk. As an AI engineer, I find this pretty amusing because we humans only create "new" stuff by constantly reworking past ideas.Take artists, for example. Before they develop their own style, they spend years studying and imitating others. Their "new" ideas aren't really new, just different enough from what we remember to feel fresh. Sure, there are painting elephants who aren't "standing on the shoulders of giants," but their "art" is like saying, "Wow, GPT-2 finally wrote a decent email."Even before AI, people were saying, "All the good music's been written," "All the great films have been made," "All the best books..." You get the idea. We're mostly just mixing and matching now, but that's exactly what AI does too.So either we can't create anything truly "new" without building on our "old" stuff (which used to be "new" once upon a time), or generative models can create "new" things just like we do. Your thoughts?

taylodl · Accepted Answer

One way of understanding the philosophical concept of Determinism is that we can't create anything new - it's an illusion that we do. Philosophy has largely taken a backseat to science for the past 100 or so years, but I think AI is going to bring it back into the forefront.https://pressbooks.ccconline.org/introtophilosophy/chapter/5....

_spduchamp · Answer

I'll somewhat disagree about our ability to create new work. Our creativity can jump to different levels of perspective and observation, and we can transfer novel concepts across different domains. The complexity of this is truly astounding and yields new art and science all the time. Yes, it's it always based on something from the past, because generally that's our only way to understand and even perceive what is new, but the advancement of ideas applied to new domains is always new frontier.

ThePhysicist · Answer

ChatGPT is so smart for some questions, e.g. it can literally do probability calculations or advanced math equations and get them right most of the time. But ask it about creative ideas and try to spar with it a bit and it will just regurgitate the same ideas and concepts. Not sure if this a problem with the prompt but I find it seriously limited for creative work. Still very good though, while it can't come up with very creative stuff by itself it can sometimes nudge you in the right direction.

NoFunPedant · Answer

I think you misunderstand the nature of art. You say that creation is merely reworking past ideas. That might be true if art were mere decoration or a formal game of manipulating symbols according to rules. But the true purpose of art is to communicate human experience, which always varies from individual to individual and from one historical period to the next. Humans are always having new experiences and having new thoughts and emotions about those experiences. High-quality art seeks to say something new, original, and specific to the artist's perspective, the culture of the moment, and the deepest concerns of the audience. LLMs can't develop any of that -- AI doesn't have real experiences to reflect on and has no desire to communicate.
Obviously, I'm talking about art at its highest level -- the average Marvel movie does not have such lofty goals, and I have no doubt a machine can reproduce all the same tired tropes of a Marvel movie. If all you're familiar with is derivative pop culture, I can see how one might think that AI can do just as well. But I don't think anyone who has ever had a profound engagement with a work of art would agree.
I am sure there will be an explosion of AI-generated content in the coming months, but I suspect this will inadvertently advance everyone's aesthetic education. More and more people will be disappointed by AI-generated "art," and I think they'll start to appreciate genuine human creativity more.

techostritch · Answer

I asked ChatGPT to develop and image of the founding fathers, and it was strikingly similar to the image on the Wikipedia page. Same color scheme, same layout, it was clearly directly encoded into the network or whatever. So for one, I just think either it’s not tuned right or there’s not nearly enough data in there, but 1. I think that creativity is not quite as mechanistic as people may imagine in their heads.
And like maybe creativity is really ultimately just curation, and like how does AI/LLMs sell people on their vision. chatGPT can’t just library of Babel their way to creativity.
I don’t think that AI will never be creative but I think it’s a deeper philosophical question then yes/no.