Are AI models narrowly creative?

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Tyler Mills’s avatar

AIs have created output that is not only novel, but seems to constitute new knowledge (resilient information), such as the famous Move 37 from AlphaGo. That is new knowledge because the move was not present in the training data explicitly, nor did the designers construct it.

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Tyler Mills’s avatar

Since evolution created genetic knowledge from nothing, it can be said to have the same "narrow creativity" as AI. The confusion over whether AI "is creative" can be resolved by saying that it is, but only narrowly (like evolution), and that the creativity defining people is universal, not limited to any domain. AI creates knowledge in domains it was designed for; AGI can create knowledge in all possible domains, each of which it designs itself.

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Tyler Mills’s avatar

This also admits of the distinction between AI and AGI (and "universal creativity") as being whether the system is capable of creating knowledge ex nihilo, as argued by Deutsch. Only universal creativity could create knowledge from nothing. Bounded creativity must start with something.

Tyler Mills’s avatar

But nature created genetic knowledge from nothing. So this is an example of something which does not have universal creativity which created knowledge ex nihilo.

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Tyler Mills’s avatar

Nature does have universal creativity; it can generate any possible knowledge. And all possible knowledge exists somewhere in reality.

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Tyler Mills’s avatar
Only version leading to #4859 (3 total)
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By this standard, a random number generator has universal creativity as well, and is therefore a person. So there must be a standard for personhood other than: able to generate any possible explanation. Such as: can do that tractably.

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Knut Sondre Sæbø’s avatar
Only version leading to #4859 (3 total)

I think the core of universal creativity isn't about efficiency, it's the open-ended capacity to restructure what counts as a problem, a solution, and relevant data. Creativity is (at least partially) the ability to reformulate the problem space itself, not by ironing out implications of existing theories. An AI and computational systems is already good at ironing out the implications in our language and existing knowledge systems. But that's search within a given space, not the creation of a new one. Creativity seems to work on a higher level. It's operating at the level of problem framing, which requires things like relevance. An AI can't create new relevance, because its weights are a statistical compression of what humans have already found relevant. It inherits a frame; it doesn't generate one.

I think this shows that tractability can't do the work the bounty asks. Tractability is defined relative to a fixed problem space. But universal creativity is (at least partially) the capacity to restructure the space, to change what counts as a problem, a solution, and relevant data.

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Knut Sondre Sæbø’s avatar

Superseded by #4858. This comment was generated automatically.

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