Hacker News Reader

Comment by hcarvalhoalves | Hacker News Reader

Is this creativity, or is it remixing pieces of the creativity from the authors in the training data samples? Would it come up with anything that seems creative if the training data isn’t creative in the first place? I guess it’s a philosophical question, how to define “creativity”.

View on HN

Putting on my visual artist and composer hats, I assert that all creativity is synthesis. When a listener finds one of my compositions surprising, it’s because they don’t know all the sources of the micro elements of the composition. But I often do. If I thought about it harder, I could say I usually do.

My first reaction was annoyance: "It's just stealing work from thousands of other artists!" But then I realized that I, as an artist, basically do the same thing. Why is it ok for me to do, but not a machine?

I think it's easier to label these images as 'creative' than it is to label them as 'art'. Art is a very slippery subject (it's subjective). Personally, I'd be happy seeing many of these images on an acid trip. Do they provide any social commentary, connect with me emotionally, or give me any food for thought? No. But then, a lot of the stuff churned out by modern media is equally as vacuous.

They do all the things you mentioned. There’s definite social commentary (cognitive merchant) and several of them are emotionally evocative.

Artists that produce something truly new currently seem to be once in a generation geniuses.

> or is it remixing pieces of the creativity from the authors in the training data samples?

I think you just described the majority of what is (for many) the "creative process".

Art has clearly developed over the millennia and it's possible to trace the lineage of ideas, techniques, subjects, and style back through history which means that most human art is substantially a remixing of older art.

That’s exactly what humans do too which is why is easy to break down art into schools/styles/epochs

Reply on news.ycombinator.com