A link to the paper itself, if like me you have a math background, and are wondering WTF that means and how you measure creativity mathematically. Or for that matter what amateur-tier creativity is. Unfortunately, it’s probably too new to pirate, if you don’t have a subscription to the Journal of Creative Behaviour.
At least according to the article, he argues that novelty and correctness are opposite each other in an LLM, which tracks. The nice round numbers used to describe that feel like bullshit, though. If you’re metric boils down to a few bits don’t try and pad it by converting to reals.
That’s not even the real kicker, though; the two are anticorrelated in humans as well. Generations of people have remarked at how the most creative people tend to be odd or straight-up mentally ill, and contemporary psychology has captured that connection statistically in the form of “impulsive unconventionality”. If it’s asserted without evidence that it’s not so in “professional” creative humans, than that amounts to just making stuff up.
If we increase an LLM’s predictive utility it becomes less interesting, but if we make it more interesting it becomes nonsensical (since it can less accurately predict typical human outputs).
Humans, however, can be interesting without resorting to randomness, because they have subjectivity, which grants them a unique perspective that artists simply attempt (and often fail) to capture.
Anyways, however we eventually create an artificial mind, it will not be with a large language model; by now, that much is certain.
Ah, but if there’s no random element to a human cognition, it should produce the exact same output time and time again. What is not random is deterministic.
Biologically, there’s an element of randomness to neurons firing. If they fire too randomly, that’s a seizure. If they don’t ever fire spontaneously, you’re in a coma. How they produce ideas is nowhere close to being understood, but there’s going to be an element of an ordered pattern of firing spontaneously emerging. You can see a bit of that with imaging, even.
Anyways, however we eventually create an artificial mind, it will not be with a large language model; by now, that much is certain.
It does seem to be dead-ending as a technology, although the definition of “mind” is, as ever, very slippery.
The big AI/AGI research trend is “neuro-symbolic reasoning”, which is a fancy way of saying embedding a neural net deep in a normal algorithm that can be usefully controlled.
I didn’t say there’s no randomness in human cognition. I said that the originality of human ideas is not a matter of randomized thinking.
Randomness is everywhere. But it’s not the “randomness” of an artist’s thought process that accounts for the originality of their creative output (and is detrimental to it).
Consider the following question: “why did you write something sad?”
for an LLM, the answer is that a mathematical formula came up heads.
for a person, the answer is “I was sad.”
Maybe the sadness is random. (That’s depression for you.) But it doesn’t change the fact that the subjective nature of sadness fuels creative decisions. It is why characters in a novel do so and so, and why their feelings are described in a way that is original and yet eerily familiar — i.e., creatively.
randomness is a central part of a human coming up with an idea.
So, here’s how I understand this claim. Either
As an endorsement of the Copenhagen Interpretation about the ubiquity of randomness at the quantum level. Or
As a rejection of subjectivity (à la eliminative materialism), which reduces thoughts, emotions, and consciousness to facts about neural activation vectors.
(1) means randomness is background noise cancelled out at scale. We would still ask why some people are more creative than others, (or why some planets are redshifted compared to others) and presumably we have more to say than “luck,” since the chances that Shakespeare wrote his plays at random is 0.
Interpretation (2) suggests that creativity doesn’t exist and this whole conversation is senseless.
Well, what is creativity? Does it have to be transcendent? Or does it just mean original and useful or coherent, like in the paper? If it’s the latter, a collection of cells can be creative, and an extremely large mathematical system embodied in a GPU could also, potentially, be creative. It’s just a matter of being able to reach the creative concept (probably somewhat randomly), without outputting incoherent garbage first.
Isn’t that what coming up with an idea feels like? Wandering through the space of concepts until everything clicks together all the sudden?
This goes towards answering your other reply, too. I have no idea what it’s “like” to be an LLM, and how much it differs from “being” nothing, but if experience (for the sake of argument) is necessary to output decent art, then isn’t an AI replacing artists evidence it has an experience? That is something that has empirically happened, at least for some kinds of artists and to some degree.
On actual mental illness specifically, as opposed to just “weirdness” in general, I have no hard data. If it’s caused at the physiological level, it makes sense that it wouldn’t follow the same pattern. You can of course name a bunch of mentally ill but prominent thinkers and artists from the past, but there’s almost certainly a lot of neglect of base rate going on there.
It’s worth noting production LLMs choose randomly from a significant range of tokens they deem fairly likely, as opposed to choosing the most likely one every time. If they were too conservative with it, they too would fall on the near side of that curve.
My point is that “weirdness” is rooted in subjectivity. Since LLMs have no subjectivity, they’re forced to rely on randomness, monkey-with-a-typewriter style, which is why their outputs are either banal or nonsensical.
even if hypothetically a neural net can generate the exact same piece a human makes they will not be treated aesthetically or culturally as the same by any audience. a big part (or perhaps the only differentiating part) of what makes good art good is how people think about and interact with it. and the creation process is absolutely critical in mediating that.
That the exact same piece of art will have a wildly different value depending on who’s seen to have made it, is true. And that goes for different humans, as well as for human vs. AI. Usually artists find that part undesirable, though. It’s supposed to be a skill they personally have and not just about connections and clout.
You’re probably right that people aren’t going to stop wanting Banksy, even if AI can do an equally good Banksy.
BTW, photography did kill painting, as it was. Painting portraits was like a steady trades job before - people wanted to be remembered and seen by future generations, and with no cameras that was the only way. Afterwards, it just becomes a form of fine art. A lot of the anger now is because something similar is happening to, like, graphic designers.
who’s seen to have made it does matter but is not the important part, the important point is the causal chain by which the art is manifested into the final product matters. people assign much lower value to artwork that has been traced vs original pieces for instance.
photography did not kill the aesthetic value of paintings. people have and still appreciate good paintings even with the rise of photography. of course photography has changed painting stylistically, but has not killed its aesthetic value. the question of how much people value art aesthetically is related but separate from economic considerations. don’t get the concepts mixed up. as i argued in the article, it follows from the statement that art is not a state function to the case that it is merely that our tools to make art evolve, but good art is always hard to make and intrinsically valuable regardless of what tools are available, even if those tools are a camera or a neural net.
To be a bit glib, it’s always about money. And ego, in the case of the skill involved. People here aren’t angry and insulting me because I’m technically wrong about the philosophy of aesthetics.
I’m just someone on the internet, and you should talk to other artists. If I’m guessing correctly, the response won’t be “you’re right, as long as the causal chain is intact it’s fine”.
pretty much no artists, or consumers of artistic works, would say their art is aesthetically more valuable simply because it costs more due to whatever the current economic situation is. of course there may be some correlation though, but think about whether it is causative, or perhaps the other way around (maybe art that has more aesthetic value entails they on average fetch higher prices based on however much people value their spare dollars in the current economy…).
also, artists actually aren’t the best people to ask about the philosophy of aesthetics, philosophers are. mostly because artists spend their time making art whereas philosophers spend their time actually thinking deeply about these things. (though asking an artist might be better than the average consumer, because we artists are more attuned to the relationship between the creation process and our works)
Sure, hey, I have a 3d replica of The Thinker, I’ll sell it to you at the full price of the original. Obviously they are worth the same to you.
And yeah, you didn’t. So what? The grant was for all types of art, so it’s relevant. But it makes sense a clanker wouldn’t understand how to read very well, you have to get your robot girlfriend to do it for you.
Or a few minutes and a neural net.
This is going to make people furious but it’s kind of true, and might actually be part of the argument for the policy.
LLMs are mathematically limited to amateur skill ceiling in creativity. Additionally, they’re fundamentally combinatorial and incapable of originality. This is why we are yet to see a single page of LLM fictional prose that doesn’t suck balls.
A link to the paper itself, if like me you have a math background, and are wondering WTF that means and how you measure creativity mathematically. Or for that matter what amateur-tier creativity is. Unfortunately, it’s probably too new to pirate, if you don’t have a subscription to the Journal of Creative Behaviour.
At least according to the article, he argues that novelty and correctness are opposite each other in an LLM, which tracks. The nice round numbers used to describe that feel like bullshit, though. If you’re metric boils down to a few bits don’t try and pad it by converting to reals.
That’s not even the real kicker, though; the two are anticorrelated in humans as well. Generations of people have remarked at how the most creative people tend to be odd or straight-up mentally ill, and contemporary psychology has captured that connection statistically in the form of “impulsive unconventionality”. If it’s asserted without evidence that it’s not so in “professional” creative humans, than that amounts to just making stuff up.
If we increase an LLM’s predictive utility it becomes less interesting, but if we make it more interesting it becomes nonsensical (since it can less accurately predict typical human outputs).
Humans, however, can be interesting without resorting to randomness, because they have subjectivity, which grants them a unique perspective that artists simply attempt (and often fail) to capture.
Anyways, however we eventually create an artificial mind, it will not be with a large language model; by now, that much is certain.
Ah, but if there’s no random element to a human cognition, it should produce the exact same output time and time again. What is not random is deterministic.
Biologically, there’s an element of randomness to neurons firing. If they fire too randomly, that’s a seizure. If they don’t ever fire spontaneously, you’re in a coma. How they produce ideas is nowhere close to being understood, but there’s going to be an element of an ordered pattern of firing spontaneously emerging. You can see a bit of that with imaging, even.
It does seem to be dead-ending as a technology, although the definition of “mind” is, as ever, very slippery.
The big AI/AGI research trend is “neuro-symbolic reasoning”, which is a fancy way of saying embedding a neural net deep in a normal algorithm that can be usefully controlled.
I didn’t say there’s no randomness in human cognition. I said that the originality of human ideas is not a matter of randomized thinking.
Randomness is everywhere. But it’s not the “randomness” of an artist’s thought process that accounts for the originality of their creative output (and is detrimental to it).
For LLMs, the opposite is true.
Actually, it seems pretty likely randomness is a central part of a human coming up with an idea.
Consider the following question: “why did you write something sad?”
Maybe the sadness is random. (That’s depression for you.) But it doesn’t change the fact that the subjective nature of sadness fuels creative decisions. It is why characters in a novel do so and so, and why their feelings are described in a way that is original and yet eerily familiar — i.e., creatively.
So, here’s how I understand this claim. Either
(1) means randomness is background noise cancelled out at scale. We would still ask why some people are more creative than others, (or why some planets are redshifted compared to others) and presumably we have more to say than “luck,” since the chances that Shakespeare wrote his plays at random is 0.
Interpretation (2) suggests that creativity doesn’t exist and this whole conversation is senseless.
Well, what is creativity? Does it have to be transcendent? Or does it just mean original and useful or coherent, like in the paper? If it’s the latter, a collection of cells can be creative, and an extremely large mathematical system embodied in a GPU could also, potentially, be creative. It’s just a matter of being able to reach the creative concept (probably somewhat randomly), without outputting incoherent garbage first.
Isn’t that what coming up with an idea feels like? Wandering through the space of concepts until everything clicks together all the sudden?
This goes towards answering your other reply, too. I have no idea what it’s “like” to be an LLM, and how much it differs from “being” nothing, but if experience (for the sake of argument) is necessary to output decent art, then isn’t an AI replacing artists evidence it has an experience? That is something that has empirically happened, at least for some kinds of artists and to some degree.
So, when it comes to mental illness and creativity, despite some empirical correlations, “There is now growing evidence for the opposite association.”
However, there are inverse-U-shaped relationships between several mental characteristics and creativity:
Although you’ll notice that disinhibition rapidly becomes detrimental.
On actual mental illness specifically, as opposed to just “weirdness” in general, I have no hard data. If it’s caused at the physiological level, it makes sense that it wouldn’t follow the same pattern. You can of course name a bunch of mentally ill but prominent thinkers and artists from the past, but there’s almost certainly a lot of neglect of base rate going on there.
It’s worth noting production LLMs choose randomly from a significant range of tokens they deem fairly likely, as opposed to choosing the most likely one every time. If they were too conservative with it, they too would fall on the near side of that curve.
My point is that “weirdness” is rooted in subjectivity. Since LLMs have no subjectivity, they’re forced to rely on randomness, monkey-with-a-typewriter style, which is why their outputs are either banal or nonsensical.
“few minutes and a neural net” lmao
even if hypothetically a neural net can generate the exact same piece a human makes they will not be treated aesthetically or culturally as the same by any audience. a big part (or perhaps the only differentiating part) of what makes good art good is how people think about and interact with it. and the creation process is absolutely critical in mediating that.
That the exact same piece of art will have a wildly different value depending on who’s seen to have made it, is true. And that goes for different humans, as well as for human vs. AI. Usually artists find that part undesirable, though. It’s supposed to be a skill they personally have and not just about connections and clout.
You’re probably right that people aren’t going to stop wanting Banksy, even if AI can do an equally good Banksy.
BTW, photography did kill painting, as it was. Painting portraits was like a steady trades job before - people wanted to be remembered and seen by future generations, and with no cameras that was the only way. Afterwards, it just becomes a form of fine art. A lot of the anger now is because something similar is happening to, like, graphic designers.
who’s seen to have made it does matter but is not the important part, the important point is the causal chain by which the art is manifested into the final product matters. people assign much lower value to artwork that has been traced vs original pieces for instance.
photography did not kill the aesthetic value of paintings. people have and still appreciate good paintings even with the rise of photography. of course photography has changed painting stylistically, but has not killed its aesthetic value. the question of how much people value art aesthetically is related but separate from economic considerations. don’t get the concepts mixed up. as i argued in the article, it follows from the statement that art is not a state function to the case that it is merely that our tools to make art evolve, but good art is always hard to make and intrinsically valuable regardless of what tools are available, even if those tools are a camera or a neural net.
To be a bit glib, it’s always about money. And ego, in the case of the skill involved. People here aren’t angry and insulting me because I’m technically wrong about the philosophy of aesthetics.
I’m just someone on the internet, and you should talk to other artists. If I’m guessing correctly, the response won’t be “you’re right, as long as the causal chain is intact it’s fine”.
pretty much no artists, or consumers of artistic works, would say their art is aesthetically more valuable simply because it costs more due to whatever the current economic situation is. of course there may be some correlation though, but think about whether it is causative, or perhaps the other way around (maybe art that has more aesthetic value entails they on average fetch higher prices based on however much people value their spare dollars in the current economy…).
also, artists actually aren’t the best people to ask about the philosophy of aesthetics, philosophers are. mostly because artists spend their time making art whereas philosophers spend their time actually thinking deeply about these things. (though asking an artist might be better than the average consumer, because we artists are more attuned to the relationship between the creation process and our works)
Oh wow an idiot who thinks the only art that exists is on the Internet, that’s cool. Ever hear of paintings, moron? Sculpture? Ceramics?
AI slop isn’t art anyway, but even if it was, digital art isn’t all art, ya dingus
Hey, I didn’t say all art ever.
Although, you could definitely print off digital art and frame it, and 3D printed art will probably happen eventually.
Sure, hey, I have a 3d replica of The Thinker, I’ll sell it to you at the full price of the original. Obviously they are worth the same to you.
And yeah, you didn’t. So what? The grant was for all types of art, so it’s relevant. But it makes sense a clanker wouldn’t understand how to read very well, you have to get your robot girlfriend to do it for you.