What is creativity? And can LLMs help?

Someone said I was “very creative” this week - I don’t know if I am or not, but it started me thinking about what creativity really is, and what parts are easy/hard with LLMs.

Creativity is some mixture of randomness (noise), combination/juxtaposition, craft, iteration, and probably the deep knowledge you need to both look in the right places and recognize when you have something good. 

Some of these are easy for anyone, if they want to do them: anyone can put random things together or make small random changes to something existing. Usually the results aren’t great, but it’s fairly easy to come up with things like “Star Wars except it’s all ducks”.

Some are amenable to LLMs - iteration isn’t hard to do, with a little bit of code. I did an experiment once called “Make Creative” which consisted entirely of this parameterized prompt, which was called iteratively with it’s own output 10 times: “Add or change an element of the following idea: {idea}”. It gets weird fast.

Craft is a bit harder to pin down. It’s easy to find random things to combine, but harder to have the taste to combine things that result in good work. Perhaps this is also a job for iteration - isn’t that how we do it? Try something, see if it’s good, tweak it again, rinse and repeat? Maybe few-shot examples of “good” would be helpful here. That’s not universal but neither is creativity - acceptable for a kid painting in their room is different than acceptable for an artist displaying professionally or producing professional goods.

I think creativity is a more mechanical process than we like to admit. Certainly, many of the images that have come out of things like DALL-E in the past year would have been rated as “highly creative” by our own selves a few years ago, before we’d heard of these programs. Now we like to discount them as not being particularly creative, for a bunch of reasons, but they’re getting even better.

I suspect the line will continue to move. Creativity seems to be in the “I know it when I see it” category, but the reality is that all creation is the output of the mundane processes described above: take something and combine, mutate, iterate, elaborate, juxtapose or use some other repeatable technique to get out into the unknown, until you have something new enough and good enough. Just like other “no way a computer can do that” tasks that are now routine, I suspect creativity will be redefined and expanded over time as we learn to automate and improve parts of it.