Business Artist Digest July 21, 2023

I had the opportunity to sit down for lunch in Santa Monica recently with?Dr. Vivienne Ming, a theoretical neuroscientist, and artificial intelligence expert.

We met at the?Unleash HR Tech conference, where she delivered the keynote on AI and its impact on the current and future workforce. Over lunch, we talked about my upcoming book,?The Business Artist, as well as the science of creativity and why it matters in society.

Dr. Ming and I agreed that modern AI will continue to commoditize a lot of basic cognition. What’s left to differentiate us as humans is?creativity. While AI can speculate or make assumptions about the future, it is doing it based on data from the past.

Strange as it may sound, AI is actually limited by data.

You’re already heard of ChatGPT and may have even used it. “GPT” stands for?Generative Pre-trained Transformer.?Transformer?refers to the encoding and decoding structure, which is another way of saying that it understands language.?Pre-trained?indicates that it’s trained using pre-existing text that’s fed from the internet or other sources. And?Generative–well, that’s what all the controversy is about, isn’t it?

Despite its human-like sentence output, GPT models are simply trained to predict the next word in a sequence by modeling the probability distribution of language (what is likely the next best word, then doing it again and again). I’m intentionally referring to GPT as an “it” because it’s not a he, she, or they–remember, it’s not human! It doesn’t realize it’s not writing a sentence because it’s not sentient.

Let me put this another way: ChatGPT and other AI tools do not experience curiosity, intent, or emotions.

Here’s a good analogy. GPT is like an experienced chef who has tasted many dishes and flavors. It can now imagine and create new recipes from its experience. Keep that phrase in mind: “from its experience.” It will not create and experiment with recipes that have never been made before.

It will?create, but it is not?creative. AI does not generate novel ideas, make connections between disparate concepts, or express itself in any original way. It has no intent, it is inconsistent, and it lacks purpose in its task. I know it sounds crazy, but you don’t have to be creative to create. AI cannot make mental leaps that lead to truly new ideas.

I have a twin brother who is objectively less creative than I am. Vivienne pointed out to me that even though we share common DNA, my life experiences (traveled >75 countries), peer influences (living in LA, creative friends, married to an artist), and epigenetics (differences in gene expression) all play a huge factor.

In many ways, our life experiences comprise the Large Language Model (the P in our Pre-Trained brains). But when we choose to transform and generate new, novel ideas, that’s what fuels our human creativity. We won’t have to be enslaved by probability and patterns. We can see ways to combine emotions and experiences in original ways.

In my upcoming book, I talk a lot about the problem of automation (in addition to the problems of imitation and perception). However, I love writing about it here in the newsletter as well as the blog because it’s constantly evolving.

- Adam

From the Blog

Understanding Today’s Realities and Preparing for Tomorrow’s Challenges

I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of “connecting the dots.” I believe everything is related to everything else. No culture, idea, historical event, or current event exists in isolation. All of history, and all of humanity, is connected in an infinitely complicated web of people, places, things, events, and ideas.

Every Business Artist needs to understand the times we’re living in. There is so much going on in the world today–and so many ways to consume information–that it feels impossible to keep up. But if you look closely, you’ll see patterns.

In my forthcoming book,?The Business Artist, I’ll go into a lot more detail about how we can move forward. But for now, in this post, let’s take a look at where we are so we can better prepare for the challenges ahead.

READ MORE

Adam Recommends

I love the YouTube channel?Cold Fusion TV. All the videos are short, informative videos on tech and trending news topics. As it relates to this week’s topic, the one that I just watched was on the?“The Internet is Fake.”?This theory claims that the internet is now 66% bots. Since AI is now passing the Turning Test, which tests the intelligence of computers, bots are getting hard to spot and will soon be 90% of the internet.

Business Artist Spotlight

This week, I’m shining the spotlight on?John Hathaway, who is the co-founder and CTO of?Meahana. He brings tons of technology and business experience to us, but more importantly, he doesn’t let his "large language model" (that he’s been pre-trained on) hold him back.

In building the technology for Meahana, he often reminds us that he’s built a lot of things in the past that no one used or needed. This is important because we artists like to go off on creative tangents and sometimes feel guilty for not being “productive enough.” But when you’re using creativity to try and solve a problem, be careful about labeling time either “wasted” or “productive.”

When we are working through a problem, John likes to say, "Let's make sure we know we understand and know there is a problem before we try to solve it. And once we know there is a problem, we can find multiple ways to solve it.”

That’s creativity with intent. I don’t know anyone who embodies this more than John Hathaway.