In recent weeks, many media outlets have highlighted the creative capabilities of Artificial Intelligence. There has been talk about the creative capacity of machines and little about the creative capacity of human beings.
Throughout history, creativity has been understood in different ways. For example, it is believed that the first hominid with creative capacity was Homo Sapiens, who, due to some change in their frontal cortex, evolved and acquired the ability to create paintings using mineral pigments, and then used this ability to paint hunting scenes or even imagine animals. In ancient Greece, creativity was considered a divine gift and was attributed to the gods. Later, in the Middle Ages, creativity was thought to be a mechanical process, a kind of combination of elements. And during the Renaissance, creativity was understood as a form of individual expression and considered an essential quality of the human being.
Today we define the creativity as the faculty of creation, which consists of producing something new, something from nothing. Usually when we talk about creativity we associate it with the arts (writing, painting, music, etc.), but it is a very limited vision, creativity is not only linked to the arts, creativity exists in many other areas. On the other hand, if we assume the literalness of the definition of creativity, we cannot deny that a machine is creative. Today machines are capable of combining concepts, connecting them, and producing something new, or as Americans say in legal jargon, a “transformative work“.
So, we can say that a machine can create and therefore has creativity, therefore, it uses algorithms, that is, its creativity is programmed. This programming consists of joining words by calculating the Cartesian product of their vector representation and evaluating whether this represents a strong link between them. A kind of statistical imagination.
Obviously when Miguel de Unamuno wrote “all calm hair, the Moon, calm and alone, caressed the Earth with her pink, wild, white, hidden hair…” he was not making any Cartesian product, but rather using his imagination, which human beings have. And imagination requires attention, access to episodic memory, the capacity for reflection, self-awareness, the capacity to supervise everything that comes to us from the outside and large doses of concentration, and all of this works after a very complex evolutionary process. But, as Yuval Noah Harari says, “humans are essentially a collection of biological algorithms shaped by millions of years of evolution,” so there is something “algorithmic” about us.
And this is where we all have the same dilemma, it’s the creative machines. My opinion is that in their own way they are, but with nuances. For example, they are not self-aware, we can say that they do not dream of their own experiences or imagine the “calm and lonely moon, [..] white and hidden”, but if you ask them to create a poem in the style of Miguel de Unamuno, the result is at least convincing, “The white moon rises in the sky, illuminating the world with its cold light. It is a mirror of the human soul, full of mystery and solitude.” Apart from the improvable rhyme, it is a unique and new piece.
So, I think we could say that these AIs have the ability to be creative and at the same time do it artificially, a kind of “Creartificiality”, that , if we bring it to the visual arts, we could talk about a “ Artificial “. Maybe it’s time to give a different name to the creations produced by AIs.