🎨 How do you define creativity?
One idea is randomness / modular creativity — unexpected answers or surprising combinations; taking two things that have never been put together before and combining them in a new way. LLMs are great at this (e.g. “write me a love poem in the style of Eminem”) — and you can turn up the temperature dial of randomness in an LLM so it gives you more "creative" (or statistically unlikely) answers. e.g. when asked for a list of animals, a low temperature LLM might give you “cat, dog, cow” whereas as a high temp LLM might say, “aardvark, sugar glider, paddymelon” or even more fantastically, “hippogriff, jigglypuff,” or a made up “plinktail.”
Prior to my career as an investor, I was a designer (also a contemporary dancer and musician). In my view, this idea of modular creativity is just one facet of how we invent new ideas. Humans are a product of their experience and context, so creativity is inherently filtered through an artist's own lived experience in the world.
Artists and authors like Dada and Hemingway who lived in a time of dramatic changes in society processed their shifting world through their works. As a person embodied in a political and cultural context, their art reflected and expressed what it was like to live in that new world.
We are arguably living through another period of dramatic changes to the human condition, but I wonder if our current creative tools are enabling us to effectively process and interpret those changes as they so heavily favour “remixing” methods?
If machines today are mostly combining existing elements (or “building blocks” of creativity) in new ways, is this perhaps only one facet of creativity, that ultimately lacks the interpretation of the human condition in which the art is created? Is this enough?
If we enter into an era of largely regenerative art, will we lose the skill to create net new building blocks to fuel those new combinations?
It is easy to see elements of creativity that we don’t understand as somewhat mystical... imbuing creative inspiration with metaphysical or even divine undertones. There's an urge to draw boundaries around our islands of human exceptionalism; to argue that what we’re doing is inherently special.
If machines gain the ability to gather the same datasets in the world, and capture that context, and lived experience from our perspectives (e.g. constant wearables), will they become super processors and super modular-combiners of the human condition and ultimately be far more creative than us?
Is that objectively “good” or “bad?” Why?
The more our human experience intertwines with the tools we create, the more those tools shape our understanding of who and what we are as humans.
Come dig into these questions (and many more) with me, Jessie Hughes and Jonno Seidler next THURSDAY 17 OCTOBER @ 3-4p at the SXSW Canada House (The Abercrombie Hotel) as I moderate this discussion and debate around AI and creativity.
cc: Side Stage Ventures
