Why AI Will Never Rival Human Creativity

To piggyback off your point, any sufficiently capable AI (not what we have now) would easily squash whatever humans create simply because it would be able to transcend existence and have a consciousness of its own. His arguments straw man the AI, in essence.

I agree that there is so much to disagree with in the article. For me, the author shot his argument in the foot with this paragraph:

> In art, what’s more, the true and the good are unstable. Every great breakthrough in art is rejected at first. All truly original art—Cubism, bebop, the dance of Merce Cunningham—is reviled by the standards of its day. Often it is judged to not be art at all. It is noise, or nonsense, or something that your five-year-old can do. AIs create, perforce, according to existing standards. If the true and the good are beyond their ken, all the more so are tomorrow’s true and good, the ones that don’t exist yet, the ones great art brings into being.

I don't know much about ML, but I do know that what gets generated will be based on what the machine has been trained on. Feed in derivative art, get out derivative art. Feed in a grand collection of seemingly unrelated data and the "noise" that gets generated from it today might well be part of tomorrow's definition of "art".

And then, for me, the entire argument fell to pieces when the author introduced (in the next paragraph) the false dichotomy between art vs tech:

> [...] Part of the confusion in discussions of AI and art undoubtedly arises from the degraded conception of creativity that has taken hold, in recent years, in tech. Nothing is original, techno-pundits like to say; “everything is a remix.” This is a banality that grew up to become a stupidity.

People have been saying, when it comes to my specialist creativity (poetry) that "nothing is original" for the best part of 2 millennia. The Romans even invented a poetic form called the Cento[1], which itself got invented anew in the past few decades as Found Poetry[2]. So it goes (stealing from Vonnegut): good poets create; great poets steal. And all poems lie.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cento_(poetry)

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_poetry