I question whether AI can create engaging new ideas. Isn't everything it outputs already based on existing data?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind
The most articulate version is something you hear from religious types which is "you have the power to create because God created you" but if God can delegate its creative power to you why can't you delegate your creative power to something you created?
"Uniqueness" is not real creativity, I mean, the Python script
from uuid import uuid4
print(uuid4())
From the viewpoint of being compelling, some people are easy to satisfy. An AI might be able to satisfy them better you can because what that person needs might be squicky to you or at best tiresome and your "self" will get in the way of seduction, yet the AI can always respond the way it wants you to respond. I'm highly satisfied with the selections that are made by my YOShInOn smart RSS reader even though these are just selections and not "creations", however I'd imagine a system which you work with over a long time and that learns you preferences could "create" things that satisfy you much better than what you can find on the internet.
We can find different ways to tell them which can be entertaining and it can feel new but when you examine it it's not really new.
This is a red herring, and entirely irrelevant
The question of whether or not humans or AI "do" create new ideas is not relevant
The question is whether or not humans or AI can create new ideas
Humans quite obviously can, because humans did. Even if you see the same common themes for 10000 years, at some point those themes were created by humans. We must be capable of creating new ideas, even if we don't actually do it very much.
AI may not even be capable of creating new ideas. It probably isn't in its current state, and may not ever be
If you do not know where the original ideas came from or how they originated it is impossible to determine if AI is capable of doing the same thing. Even accepting the premise that humans did originate these ideas, there zero evidence that they did it spontaneously with no inputs. So with that premise in hand if AI is provided the same inputs it is likely they would produce the same outputs. Considering whatever those inputs where is completely unknown and unknowable at this point All of it is conjecture except for the fact that humans are effectively not creating net new ideas therefore there should be no expectation that AI is able to do that either.
What are you talking about
We do know where ideas came from! They came from humans! We sent humans to the moon using ideas about rocketry that a human invented, we know that because some of those people were alive when we were alive!
Look at the current AI LLM boom? The people responsible for that technology is alive today, you can talk to them!
Claiming that these ideas were the sole creation of humans with zero external input seems to be the same argument that intelligent design people make when they look at the complexity of biological systems. Are you a proponent of intelligent design? Because they draw the same conclusions that something of such complexity must have had an initial creator.
If you bother to read up a few comments you will see the entire point of this thread is that there is a base assumption that AI cannot create anything absent the supplied input that they've been given. So refocus on that and my response that humans have not been shown to create anything absent the supplied input that they have been given. To make an assumption that humans created something absent inputs would require an extraordinary amount of proof demonstrating that that's possible.
I have no idea how you would demonstrate that's possible because humans continually receive input from their surroundings all of the time.
There are people who have argued that human creativity is nothing more than outputs based on existing data (experience).