“Can AI innovate?”
It’s the question of the hour, isn’t it? Since the generative AI model ChatGPT charged onto the scene in November of 2022, people have been using it for everything. From writing emails to drafting full novels, this is essentially the librarian of the Digital Library of Alexandria we call the modern internet. Sure, it can be flighty, and it’s not always accurate, but generative AI has catapulted how we work into a new age.
However, the question of AI creativity remains. Can AI be creative, or can it only act as a framework for human beings to enact their creativity? Let’s find out.
AI Creativity: Does Generation Mean Creation?
To answer this question, let’s look deeper into how generative AI works. In simple terms, Large Language Models (LLM) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) blend to create generative AI. It can parse large amounts of data and then produce lookalike data in response to a question or prompt, which sets its parameters. This can look like creativity and even feel like the AI is producing something entirely new. But by the very nature of how it works, generative AI isn’t creating. It’s reshaping what already exists.
Researchers recently coined the term “artificial creativity”. It’s a quality given to things produced by AI, which can be judged as creative out of context but is the product of a massive amount of parsed data shaped in ways that are completely limited by what already exists. This also raises the importance of copyright or intellectual property, which AI is not bound by. Any data available to it will be consumed and used to produce an answer, meaning that one person’s creation becomes the basis of what others judge as creative once reproduced by an AI model.
Now, there’s an argument in the creative community that all artists, writers, and other creators ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’. In other words, we might use the work of those who came before us as a new baseline to evolve from. At times, this can look like a parallel to ‘AI creativity’, but perspective’s missing.
So, What Now?
AI is designed to be objective, parsing information without judgement or a particular lens to provide a given answer. This is one of its strengths, but it can also be a weakness. A bug that is also a feature.
If the missing ingredient in AI innovation is perspective—a lens, a subjective point of view that refracts information like a prism refracts light, breaking it into all its component colours… then it’s the human mind on which AI creativity hinges. Generative AI is a tool like any other, but because this one has so many additional capabilities, it can blur the lines.
The fact that AI cannot necessarily be creative itself – at least, not right now – does not mean there is no place for AI in creative industries. Talking to AI can be like talking to yourself, like having a creative partner with access to the entirety of the shared digital consciousness. That’s no small thing.
Much like a paintbrush or a library of books, AI can be a source of inspiration instead of its own font of creativity. Embraced properly, this offers creatives a way to clear away the clutter of the creative process and find new ways to tap into what they think, feel, hear, and see. In other words, it’s up to us to be careful with how we use this tool.