Hacker News Reader

Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> That's what the AI's really are terrible at -- creativity. But I'd argue the vast majority of humans aren't very creative, with truly out-of-the-box ideas. Given that this is HN, and a non-trivial number of us have ADHD, creativity is positively correlated with ADHD.

I think it's hard to define creativity in the context of AI because they seemingly just make up new hyphenated terms for everything. Is that creativity? If not, what about when they do the same thing different ideas in the latent space?

If we say that simply nailing one concept to another isn't creativity, then AIs are incapable of creativity, while the vast majority of humans are incapable of creativity. This is just a long way of saying "0 AIs have creativity, 0.00001% of humans have creativity", and the difference between zero and a very small number is infinity.

View on HN

It always comes back to taste.

It’s not that they’re incapable of creativity, it’s that LLM-driven creativity is terrible, and nothing makes me cringe more than when it uses a word in a “novel” way.

But monkeys-with-typewriters, they sometimes stumble upon something that doesn’t suck. But if you don’t want to spend a fortune retrying the same task until you get a suitable result you have to inject your own taste.

Sometimes I start with a super vague prompt and see how close agents can get to something that doesn’t suck. I inevitably get frustrated about 6-7 prompts in when they’ve created a complete mess because they have no taste. So I restart and inject my taste into the process. Things like linters, test suites, which 3PLs to use, etc.

Taste or vision? They are hill climbing and they can't see the other side. And sometimes that is because they don't live in your head and don't know what you want.

Very insightful actually. Taste and vision are both instances of holding a model that predicts a good result beyond the threshold of validity in theory but reality happens to align. Is it luck then? Perhaps meta-luck where lucky weights produce “accidentally great” results with some predictability.

Steve Jobs had a mental model that brought the iPhone. No one really wanted it but something in his life biased the result.

So creativity is having weights so good you can project way out into latent space beyond what is reasonable.

Nice to get some resonance. And if I may, past --> taste; vision --> future. And to compensate for our poor memory, taste<=>value network while vision<=>policy network, borrowing from RL parlance.

I hope you’re not actually trying to compare human cognitive processes to an LLM, because that would be incredibly reductive, not to mention lacking in any empirical grounding.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com