Can Machines Be Creative?
In the past year and a half we have seen a lot of Gen AI models coming up, be it Large Language Models (LLMs) or Image Generators. Some folks have started to call these creative machines and may replace the jobs of creative personnel such as journalists, copywriters, artists, etc.
I thought I write this issue to shed more light on creativity and the current struggle in accepting the statement “Machines are creative”. I am not here to change opinions but more of what I have gathered so far.
Margaret A Boden has defined three types of creativity. They are:
Combinational Creativity - Unfamiliar (but interesting) meshing of two or more familiar ideas.
Exploratory Creativity - Taking two or more existing structures or styles, and meshed them together for novelty and determining feasibility thereafter.
Transformational Creativity - Manipulating the dimensions of existing styles and structures greatly.
With these three creativity is stated and (hopefully well-) defined. Let us ask the question, which creativity can machines satisfy or meet?
We know that LLMs or ImageGen models have “read” and “seen” a lot of text and images, far beyond what any human can achieve in his/her lifetime in the world. As such when LLMs or ImageGen comes up with something, the human may find it novel because again, the human experience of the world is pretty small as compared to the machines’ “experience” of the world.
But these novelties at most are brought together by what the machine has experienced since what it “experience” is greatly dependent on the data that is fed into it.
With this in mind, you can see that machines can possibly deal out a lot of combinational creativity for sure! You can say that the machines give a weighted average of familiar ideas combined.
Machines possibly can help with exploratory creativity which requires generation of prototypes, for feasibility testing by humans. Machines can be used to generate the prototypes quickly by taking advantage of its speed of generation, and for humans to make a quick assessment on whether to move forward with it or not.
So where machines cannot be creative on is transformational creativity, where we are branching out from an existing idea into something new the world has never seen at all. This kind of creativity is not achievable in machines because of the lack of training data provided and might take the human a lot longer to assess possibility and feasibility.
Conclusion
Here lies the biggest difference in human creativity vs machine creativity. Machine Creativity can do combinational creativity, help out on exploratory creativity but very likely cannot do transformational creativity. Humans can do transformational creativity which is important if humanity is to advance, building novelty ideas, getting better technology and pushing the knowledge frontier further.
Ok…so is GenAI or machines in general creative? Will love to hear your thoughts!
I very much enjoyed the discussion which presented many perspectives. If you do, consider reaching out to me on LinkedIn.
Consider supporting my work! You can make a “book” donation and drop me some wisdom! :)
Recommendations
This is a good question with an easy answer: yes. It is able to take novel ideas and draw pictures about them. If humans can be considered as creative, AI can too.
Nice way in deconstructing the construct of creativity. Too often, we think of creativity in the realm of art, but ALL work requires creativity. Combinatorial and Exploratory creativity is spot on about Gen AI. But there is also the challenge of "eye of the beholder" – the receiving end of the creativity. Humans make and evaluate simultaneously, while Gen AI doesn't yet have that sense of 'evaluation'. Not sure how that space will evolve, but it would have to emerge at some point.