Creativity can be a Cliché

“AI will never be creative.” That’s a familiar mantra.

We all know what creativity is, don’t we?

Cambridge: “the ability to produce or use original and unusual ideas.”

Britannica: “the ability to make or otherwise bring into existence something new, whether a new solution to a problem, a new method or device, or a new artistic object or form.”

I don’t dispute that creativity, in this sense, is well beyond the reach of LLMs.

But I argue that most of what’s passed off as creative—and often appears quite creative—is, in fact, iterative. Which works perfectly well for many things, including most advertising.

But to raise the ‘creativity’ stanchion, and then diminish LLMs, is to set an impossibly high barrier, at which AI invariably fails. Then people dismiss AI as “well, I told you it’s not creative.”

And thereby miss the iterative stuff that it’s very good at.

I’ll be posting a long essay on this topic in the not distant future, after I finish reading:

The Creativity Code, by Marcus du Sautoy, and

The Artist in the Machine, by Athur I. Miller

and re-reading Literary Theory for Robots, by Dennis Yi Tenen