Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

We've seen a number of examples in recent months of artificial intelligences writing text, generating images, and other apparently creative tasks. This prompts the inevitable classification question: are the AIs being genuinely creative? It's tempting to say no - "a computer replacing a human's limited photoshop skills isn't creativity. It took a human to say 'create a picture of a dog riding a bike.' An AI couldn't do that of its own volition. That's creativity." But what the computer does, says Loukides, is separate the technique (artistic craft, copmpositional craft, etc) away from the artistic process (which is the finding of "something that didn't exist, and couldn't have existed, before"). Could a computer do that? Well - yeah. Just insert some random variables into its algorithms, and you'll get a lot of that. The key part of creativity, to my mind, is being able to note what's worth keeping. That, to me, is a recognition problem. And to me, that means that, yes, a computer could be creative.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2024 09:00 a.m.

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