[Jimmy]

Between this and DALL-E 2, I’ve been ruminating on David Hilbert’s old quip about a student: “For a mathematician, he did not have enough imagination. But now he is a poet, and everything is fine.”

As someone with experience in both STEM and the arts, I don’t feel particularly bad about saying that some “creative” pursuits are more creative than others, and my rough thesis is that the ones on the higher end of the scale are the ones that will take longer to fall to AI.

Representational painting is, at the end of the day, a somewhat mechanical problem, so it’s not too surprising that AI is rapidly catching up to humans there. “Draw me a cat eating ice cream on the beach” is a fairly well-defined request with a clear range of acceptable solutions.

I think the creativity exhibited in a long-form written work like say, Plato’s “Republic”, is of a much higher degree than your average painting or short poem. Not only is it an aesthetically beautiful work, but it contains a great deal of novel (for its time) intellectual content as well, filtered through the personal perspective of the author, and organized in an elaborate logical structure. When it comes to these types of large-scale creative works, AI hasn’t even begun to tackle the problem yet.

[picture]

So its "intention" that is hard to replicate by machines, huh. How far is the day when the first machine decide to make something truly for its own sake?

[Jimmy]

Well, no, I wouldn’t say that my post was about “intention”. I could imagine, in principle, someone saying “hey GPT-3, write me a philosophical masterpiece” or “write me a hit novel” and it does. No intentionality required. It’s just that in actuality, it can’t do that yet.

[tintedfireglass]

"intention" refers to critical thinking and intelligence so yeah that's what is missing from AI