James B Maxwell
1 min readFeb 1, 2023

--

Simple answer: No.

More complicated answer: For many, yes. But people will always value creativity because it offers intrinsic reward.

Somewhat paradoxically, creativity has always been about the process, not the product. The product was a secondary benefit that provided competitive advantage and drove evolution. It's a bit like sex; the vast majority of people don't do it to procreate.

Also, a hot-off-the-presses paper just proved that, contrary to previous belief, Diffusion models can memorize and re-generate images from the training set. And of course, the MS lawsuit from devs at Github also indicates that Transformers can generate direct quotations. So the reality at "Uncreative" may be just as the name suggests...

Somewhat fortunately for us all, the best way to avoid the pitfalls of unwitting quotation and reproduction in generative models is to (re)insert the human user into the creative process.

Complicating footnote: If the greater human herd does travel down the path of offloading their creativity to AI, it will eventually lead to the formation of a small, elite, ruling creative class. Draw your own inferences about how good or bad that could be...

--

--

James B Maxwell
James B Maxwell

Written by James B Maxwell

Composer, musician, programmer, technologist, PhD

Responses (1)