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Comment by jruohonen | Hacker News Reader

"The problem for AI is that creative work is not predictable. It is not about statistical likelihood or simply mashing up the familiar—it is about leaps in logic and counterintuitive juxtapositions. It is about the unique experience of the individual, and seeking to do what has never been done before. It is about the least predictable next word or pixel. So the danger is not that AI programs will write the next great novel or create the next great painting, successfully replacing human inventiveness: they never will. The greater danger is that they won’t need to create great writing or art."

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I never get this argument. There is no magic in the human creative process. One way or another, algorithms should be able to replicate it and eventually surpass it.

They already did in some domains, for example AlphaGo's move 37. The article's author is coping hard.

The article and excerpt are about the AI systems that do actually exist, not the ones that might someday exist.

Author explicitly says: "they never will"

"They" refers to the programs that exist (or more broadly anything based on "statistical likelihood or mashing up the familiar", which is the overwhelmingly dominant sort); "never will" refers to "never will write the next great novel or create the next great painting", not "never will exist."

I think the author might agree that they never will exist, but because of his actual point about what they will do to creative work and communities, not any physical limitations.

> I never get this argument.

I think it is still a solid argument, especially when juxtaposed with anything related to developing something new and innovative, whether in the domain of arts, science, or business. But what I found insightful in this quote was the note about the least predictable things.

Creativity is not just cognition and pattern matching. There is something more fundamental at work... obviously calling it 'magic' doesn't describe it, but some people call it 'inspiration' and they feel it on a physiological level. They starve and torture themselves to serve it. To recreate something like that you would need to simulate not just a human's biology but an entire world.

Human expression, human experience, the soul, if you will. And from this, the prompt is where the soul is.

I think the human creative process is more interesting than AI. I love learning about the person behind the creation, and hearing how their upbringing and experiences shaped what they created.

This is the most important comment in the thread. Humans want to connect with other humans. You can pump out all of the perfectly-rendered perfectly-customized & personalized fully-immersive metaverse simulation but at the end of the day, we bags of meat and gas will still want to sit around a fire and tell ghost stories.

The market for 'fully tech driven' content exists, sure, but it'll always just be that.

Thanks! I totally agree.

The examples I always think of are Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Carver.

Vonnegut's experience in WWII heavily impacted his writing and views, and led him to create one of his best works.

Additionally, when I talked to a war veteran about Slaughterhouse Five he said that the time travel was very relatable. When he came home, he felt like he was moving backward and forward in time. Everything at his home was the same, and it was like he never left. It was such an interesting conversation, and something that made me appreciate Vonnegut so much more.

For Carver, I just really enjoyed learning about his life. His work experience, personal relationships, and experience with alcoholism shows up in almost all of his stories. I find it cool to read a story, and draw parallels to his life.

Additionally, my father was a blue collar worker and worked in many different jobs his entire life. I draw so many parallels from the stories he's told me to Raymond Carver's stories.

I really love forming connections like this to the art that I enjoy.

This is why there will still be a market for human-created art, but it'll likely be very niche, for people who care. When it comes to sheer quality, the AI should be able to surpass us at some point and create masterpieces we can't even think of.

It's more God In The Gaps. Something is declared ineffable, beyond the grasp of the mind, science, tools, AI. Then we have an undeniable breakthrough, and they roll back that stance the very smallest amount to accommodate the new knowledge.

There's a strong historical pattern that the appearance of the limits of reason has always been due to a lack of imagination, often in the very people who just spent their lives expanding its borders. And these arguments so often rest on "je ne sais quois," it comes off as more ridiculous than parsimonious. If you think you found an illogical or indeterminate system, I'd bet that your body of kmowledge just needs reframing.

Though ever further we might see, surely dragons further be! c:

Isn't the reverse of God In The Gaps just as ridiculous? Just because we have been able to use a materialistic, scientific approach to get this far doesn't necessarily mean it will keep working forever on everything.

Using your metaphor at the end: "There's dragons just over the next hill" and "There haven't been dragons so far so there will never be dragons" are both just guesses.

I don't know. It's like Frankenstein's monster reading The Sorrows of Young Werther. He could somewhat understand what the words meant, but he couldn't ever feel what was being described. Even if the monster could write about human feelings, it would be just as an observer, a reader, repeating and copying.

The magic is the biology. Computers are not going to understand the pain of taking a bullet or childbirth. What can they write about these topics except trite regurgitation?

This implies you know how the human creative process works. I doubt you do: it's an unsolved problem, like most things in this category (intelligence, creativity) dealing with how our brains function.

And yet when I watch the flood of movies, television shows, novels, music, and fine art available to me, I have a really hard time finding anything unpredictable. Great skill is involved in creating them (sometimes), but for every one experience that amazes me I have to slog through hundreds that really don't. At best I'm entertained. The output is formulaic, as you would expect from businesses guided by bookkeepers. The sad fact is that a large number of these productions very well might have been generated using an advanced LLM.

> And yet when I watch the flood of movies, television shows, novels, music, and fine art available to me, I have a really hard time finding anything unpredictable.

Wouldn't that just testify that Hollywood et al. are no longer really "innovating"?

Absolutely. They're going for all the safe, boring choices, and depending on the business side of their industry to make money. You don't show a profit by making the next Children of Men, you show a profit by tweaking the Fast&Furious formula and strong-arming theaters into showing it.

Yes, this is because Hollywood - like tech – is a subset of business, which optimizes for profits over creativity.

Which is why, as a creative, I'm not super-worried about AI destroying creativity. It might actually help democratize much of the tools one needs to make a movie or a book, but at the end of the day creative consumption is a human-to-human demand.

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