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Comment by codr7 | Hacker News Reader

They will never be creative, and creativity is a pretty big deal.

To the extent it’s measurable, LLMs are becoming more creative as the models improve. I think it’s a bold statement to say they’ll NEVER be creative. Once again, we’ll have to see. Creativity very well could be emergent from training on large datasets. But also it might not be. I recommend not speaking in such absolutes about a technology that is improving every day.

"To the extent it's measurable" is very load-bearing in the semantics here. A lot of "creativity" is very hard to measure.

I agree, and I think most people would say the current models would rank low on creativity metrics however we define them. But to the main point, I don’t see how the quality we call creativity is unique to biological computing machines vs electronic computing machines. Maybe one day we’ll conclusively declare creativity to be a human trait only, but in 2025 that is not a closed question - however it is measured.

We were talking about LLM here, not computing machines in general. LLM are trained to mimic not to produce novel things, so a person can easily think LLM wont get creative even though some computer program in the future could.

> LLM are trained to mimic not to produce novel things

Which LLM? That’s not the purpose of training for any model that I know of.

Training LLMs is literally finding sets of numbers that make them better at mimicking human language.

Difficult to measure, but trivial to define.

Creativity means play, as in not following rules, adding something of yourself.

Something a computer just can't do.

Most software engineering jobs aren't about creativity, but about putting some requirements stated in a slightly vague fashion, and actualizing it for the stakeholder to view and review (and adjust as needed).

The areas for which creativity is required are likely related to digital media software (like SFX in movies, games, and perhaps very innovative software). In these areas, surely the software developer working there will have the creativity required.

> but about putting some requirements stated in a slightly vague fashion, and actualizing it for the stakeholder to view and review

sounds like a form of creativity to me!

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