Is creativity nothing more than just a little randomness? | Hacker News Reader

Is creativity nothing more than just a little randomness?

koenvangilst.nl

1 pointvnglst5 comments

That's like claiming that evolution is nothing more than just a little randomness, while completely ignoring the arbiter of the final product: natural selection. Creativity is the same - it isn't just randomness, it's *meaningful randomness" leading to new insights and experiences, and the arbiter of that "meaning" is a human being. Creative people are actively, and often subconsciously, filtering out all the meaningless junk.

No, introducing noise into your AI won't make it more creative. You need the filter to apply to the result - which is currently impossible because that filter requires actual understanding, which today's AI is incapable of.

Creativity is not at all like adding randomness. Creativity is looking at the world from a different angle and finding the meaningful connections that viewpoint reveals.

So, that's also what I thought and still think. But the fact the just by adding some randomness to LLMs increases the usefulness of their responses (making them more "creative") seems to suggest otherwise. Maybe creativity can be reduced to just taking a random different point of view and see where that takes you. Much like the contrarian philosophy advocates.

While I agree that adding noise to the system increases its usefulness, I don't see how that counts as "creativity" at all. It's just adding noise.

Actual creativity is not randomness. The surprising aspects to creative things comes from an intentionality on the part of the artist, not from the artist just doing random things.

> Maybe creativity can be reduced to just taking a random different point of view and see where that takes you.

It can be, yes, but then the creativity is in selecting while point of view to follow up with, and what connections you make when doing so.

I think this is just another aspect of the same human tendency that makes it so easy for people to think that a machine is "intelligent" when it exhibits a bare minimum of preplanned behaviors (Eliza, for instance, or Roombas, etc.). It's easy for us to be fooled into seeing creativity where it doesn't exist.

Creativity see things behind (apparent or not) randomness. And indeed: what is really -randomness-?

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