Can AI be Creative?
Michael Spencer
A.I. Writer, researcher and curator - full-time Newsletter publication manager.
When scholars and think-tanks try to estimate how many jobs and what kinds of jobs are likely to be automated by artificial intelligence in the coming years, they forget one crucial thing: AI will scale in creativity. It's not a matter of if, it's just a matter of when.
WHAT IF AI CAN IMITATE ANYTHING?
Creativity is often cited as the one human "advantage" over machine-intelligence. However, from image recognition to vocabulary, it turns out algorithms can be pretty artistic after all. From poems that pass the Turing Test, to how computers are learning to be creative, even AI in its infancy it showing signs it can mimic and produce indistinguishable "art" from human beings.
THE INHERITANCE OF PROGRESS
With quantum computing at the service of machine-intelligence and when self-learning is achieved by AI, who's to say that this "creativity" will not scale easily catching up with human intelligence and far surpassing it in innovation, engineering and the ability to produce more intelligent versions of itself.
After all, hasn't humanity hit an evolutionary plateau? Our culture and tools change, but the base stuff of human nature in all our ignorance, corruption and short-term frame of reference of the individual, family, tribal and national unit remains the same.
In an ironic twist, AI may be the ones who inherit humanity's great thirst for progress, science and a brighter future that is not measured in decades, but in centuries.
THE AUTOMATED ECONOMY & THE FUTURE
When experts predict roughly 30% of our jobs will be done by robots by 2025, how can we be taking into account all the ways that AI could scale exponentially?
It's not possible, the fact is, we don't really know what the 2030s will look like, while we have good hunches what the 2020s will feel like.
Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, anticipates that by 2029 robots will have reached human levels of intelligence
If you have read poems written by algorithms, you might be pleasantly surprised. In many fields, there are such cases of artificial intelligence impacting human society and contributing to creativity in ways we did not anticipate. There are some decent Ted Talks on the topic.
HUMAN to AI DIALOGUE
If indeed 2 billion jobs will disappears by 2030, we should be preparing what this means for the planet and the world economy.
As a content writer, I'm already having to relate to "algorithms" that influence the distribution of our ideas and even who gets to see the filtered content of our digital experience in real-time. It's a different world fundamentally, ever few years now.
In the future, could we find ourselves in a world which increasingly turns to AI not just for solutions and business partnerships, but for companionship and even inspiration?
JUST THE BEGINNING
We are in the stone age of robots, AI and machine-intelligence yet there's already a spark in how rudimentary machine-intelligence can reconstrue, retell and recreate our own deeply cultural human narrative and language, work and art itself. We may have to soon rethink how we relate to artificial intelligence not simply as convenience, tool or pet, but as important collaborators and the future peers & companions of our children.
Look up what Baxter or IBM's Watson AI can do already now?
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE & ART
The robot Pepper is receptive to human emotions, and Google is investing in the creative potential of AI. Those very states we believed made us specially human, like our emotional intelligence and our creativity, will soon be embodied by the manifestation of artificial intelligence.
CHAT BOTS AS SOCIAL ANIMATORS
If I'm relating to a chat-bot that has access to all the conversations I've ever had with AI, it can personalize my experience better than any human being could giving me the optimal service in the language that's best for me.
In the process of being served by a chat-bot, perhaps better than a human being ever could, I'm experiencing a social landmark of artificial intelligence given a social role that can scale to nearly any service, sales or customer service situation. With Amazon Echo and Google Home, this will also change our home environments and family situations.
As AI begins to embody all that I believed made me uniquely human, it begs the question, what's next for them in relation to us?
PolyChromatic Music Composer and Researcher
7 年It seems important to clarify that the words intelligence, creativity and cognitive are being used metaphorically in computer science. AI generatively recycles and recombines massive amounts of data provided by humans, and this is what gives it an appearance similar to individual and collective intelligence. In a related way, the expanding use of audio sampling/looping in music provides a digital simile of physical instruments and musicians only because its database approximates, recycles and recombines the prior recordings of human musicians. In either instance, these similes of human intelligence and creativity are dependent on massive quantities of encoded, discrete, snippets of human content (and human generated algorithmic recombination patterns) for their approximation. Thus words like intelligence and creativity are being used metaphorically when characterizing AI as being anything more than an appearance/simulation of the qualities of consciousness and sentience. Current trends in technology and AI are replacing an increasing number of human activities. In this context, it seems important to distinguish the word ‘creativity’ in (at least) two senses: creative process (composer) versus generative recombination (compositor). Ultimately, it seems imperative to value and develop human creativity as a process to which new technology is designed to assist; as an area distinct from training the human creative process for the role of assisting (editing, arranging) a generative technological process.
Chief, Enterprise, and Solutions Architect - Thrives in a mix of Business, People and Technology
8 年I think to call it real AI it needs too be creative otherwise it's just programmed tasks done by a machine. I think it's possible in a future.
Formador en tecnología
8 年Are you creative or imaginative? ;)
Director of Advanced Detail Pty Ltd
8 年If we lost a limb we will remain the same person, therefore by asking ourselves what it is that makes us who we are, we realise that its not our physical selves that define us, but rather our thoughts (even that's debatable). If AI too is defined not by its hardware but rather by its intellect, should we allow AI it's own legal rights?