October 31, 2024

AI and Creativity

AI is scary. No, I don’t think Arnold Schwarzenegger is coming with a shotgun to Terminate me. AI scares me in a more fundamental and uncanny way. When, in 1997, Deep Blue, an IBM computer, beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov for the first, he was shocked and speechless, and so were many others. Maybe once we thought chess was a uniquely human, creative, and intelligent game and no machine could beat us. Not anymore. Bits of 1s and 0s can be pretty smart, at least for a single task for which they have been painstakingly trained on gargantuan amounts of data by tech nerds.

But still, we must have comfortingly thought, Deep Blue can’t be truly creative, can it? It can’t compose music, make paintings, or write poems. Fast forward to 2022 and Jason Allen of Colorado won the annual state fair competition; however, he didn’t make his entry with a brush or a lump of clay. He created it with Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program that turns lines of text into hyper-realistic graphics. Huh. And did you all know that The Beatles completed a new song after 45 years, with help from AI, using an old demo tape by John Lennon, kudos to AI tools that isolated Lennon’s voice.

The rapid growth of Machine Learning and Data Science is propelling us into a new age where technology and AI will pervade and permeate all over our lives. Besides making our lives easier and easier, it is forcing us to confront some fundamental existential questions about what makes us Human. Darwin pulled us down from being made in God’s image to just another species on Earth. Are we being pulled down further?

Maybe not, at least for now. In both the cases I mentioned, the AI only acted as an aid to the artists behind the creative process. AI is still rather dumb and rudimentary. Besides, creativity is not just in the final product; it is in the very human impulse to create. Humans are the only known beings who desire to express themselves by writing, painting, or composing; silly things that have no survival value as such. AI has no will or desire to create; it only imitates the work of other artists. An artist is surely inspired by others, but he draws the materials of his work from his own life’s experiences. For an AI to be truly creative, it must have the desire to create, and for that, it must have awareness, emotions, and passions. This forces us to question the very notion of Consciousness. To me, it seems that AI can never have true creativity unless they have consciousness. If biological machines made of a bunch of atoms can come to acquire consciousness and self-awareness at some stage of their evolution, then maybe one day, electronic machines made of 1s and 0s will too. Maybe one day Androids will dream of Electric Sheep?

Edited by Eva Maria Johnson

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2 responses to “AI and Creativity”

November 1, 2024

Grant Castillou

It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.

What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.

I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.

My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow

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November 3, 2024

Rks

Well penned !!

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