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670 words | 3 minute read

The Shire, Middle Earth, nr Oxford, UK

Thursday, 5 pm-ish

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Hi Reader,

This week my thoughts return to a collision of AI and Creativity. I hope you enjoy!

A Fresh Chance for Human Creativity

The excitement around AI at the moment tends to be rooted in a sense of awe and wonder, as well as fear. There persist two extreme and opposite views:

• One person says, "AI is wonderful and exciting. It will turbocharge our productivity as knowledge workers."
  And another says,
• "This is dangerous. It threatens big job losses for office workers and opens us up to all kinds of cybercrime."

Allow me put a rather different point of view. I see AI as a chance to compare and contrast with our human creativity. When AI shows what it can do, we can then appreciate what we can do beyond the digital. Also, we are more minded to abandon banal pursuits as creative because AI can do them better.

As AI advances, I see it as a chance to gain clarity on what is truly transcendent, when comes from a human imagination. Increasingly we will be able to discern, with finer and finer tuning, what is a human composition and what is not. The more we see of AI-generated art, for example, the more we will be able to recognise it as such.

Right now, we set the bar too low for our imagination. Allow me to give you an example.

Launch Creations

I get fairly frequent email updates from Kickstarter, the organisation that helps people gain funding for launching new products. Here is what I received on Tuesday this week as a list of projects they were showcasing:

• A film about two parents fighting for their children in a foster-care system.
• A magic kit for kids
• A board game based on a dating reality TV show
• A fantasy card-driven combat game
• A new bluegrass/hip hop album
• A revived retro board game
• The second in a graphic novel series
• A gothic fantasy graphic novel
• A retro dice spinner for RPG games
• A mechanical tumbler watch based upon current space exploration.

Which one of these intrigues you?

Which one makes you curious?

There was one which grabbed my attention. I did not understand what it was at first; that made me curious. And then, as I studied it … a it excited me.

This characteristic of creativity, exciting curiosity, is something irreplaceably human.

Now, I am not downplaying creativity which adapts and develops exisiting ideas. Not at all. But when there is a new genre, a new category of art or utility, we are seeing something beyond neural modelling and mimicry by computers; we are seeing something quite god-like.

In ancient Hebrew, the word ‘Creator’ is bara. And bara is a combination of two other words: bow’ meaning to come, and ra’ah meaning to see… thus, come and see.

Perhaps the essence of creativity is to excite curiosity; to prompt us to ponder deeper, to go higher, and wider… to come and see.

Perhaps the problem with AI replicating human creativity is that we have, in so doing, set the bar of our own creativity far too low. AI replicates that which is not truly transcendent.

If our response is that, “AI will catch up and overtake us,” I suspect we have a poor teleology (philosophy of meaning). We can believe that a fictional movie like the Terminator give us forecast of our future: "There will come a day soon when Skynet will become self-aware.” As well as giving too much weight to a great piece of fiction, it gives an inferior regard for what we can yet see in ourselves as humans.

So, the problem is not that we don't find AI's achievements impressive. Rather, it is that we hold such low expectations of ourselves.

Now, where's that cyborg... I'm stil waiting for my cup of tea!

Yours rambling in the Shire,

Patrick