(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Imitative AI Cannot Make You Creative [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-06-24 The CTO for OpenAI, a woman who froze like a Moms for Liberty spokesperson asked to explain themselves when she was asked if OpenAI models trained on YouTube videos, made the mistake of saying what she really believed. This time, she claimed that imitative AI would help make you more creative and that some creative jobs would go away — but that is all right since they didn’t produce high quality content. Apparently, she is unfamiliar with the output of imitative AI systems. Jokes aside, it is always helpful to hear what people really think. It illuminates all the ways in which they are being stupid. Anyone who uses the term “content” at this point when talking about art is telling on themselves. They clearly only think of creativity as a problem to be optimized away. The problem for companies like OpenAI is that their systems cannot help anyone creative, not in any meaningful way. These systems are not actually intelligent and cannot act as intelligent beings because they lack a model of the world. They are merely word and pixel calculators, with no way to determine if what they produced is reasonable. All they can do is produce what their training data says is most likely to come next. And that is not creativity. In fact, it works against creativity as it drives the output toward the median of its training data. That drive toward sameness, that mathematical imperative to the middle, prevents these systems from being creative in and of themselves. Okay, I can hear people yelling from the back, but ChatGPT helped me write my story, book, article, etc. I used it to get past a block or figure out a plot. Maybe. Maybe you fired up a system that uses enough energy to power Belgium to help you work out a plot for your novel instead of reading one of the innumerable books or websites on plotting tips, or talking through the idea with your writing group, or working through the problem yourself. But you still had to write the piece yourself. All you did was what writers have been doing for centuries — make an existing plot your own or brainstorm ideas. And those writers did it without relying on the output of a machine that steals other artists works. Nuh-uh, the voices continue. I used it to write something and then edited into what I wanted! Maybe. Maybe you used a plagiarism machine to write your first draft for you. But I promise, you whatever you produced wasn’t very good, unless you completely re-wrote it. Again, these machines mathematically tend toward what they have seen before, thus driving quality toward the middle, not the high end. It cannot create for you, and the tiny ways in which it can help all exists in better, less expensive, less environmentally dangerous formats. Ah-ha, says the business executive, clearly what she meant was the low-end writing jobs like customer service and copywriting will go away! My own business saves a ton by replacing these people with AI and a handful of editors. Maybe. Maybe you are saving money today. But we already see that chatbots tell dangerous lies to your customers. Plus, we already have expert systems that can handle most non-critical customer service tasks, and they tend to be a lot cheaper in the long run that imitative AI systems. They hardly ever bullshit your customers, for example, making them angry enough to kill and/or sue your company. And we see that the material produced requires human intervention to make it look reasonable to humans. That need is the real danger of imitative AI. I work in IT. IT goes through regular cycles of outsourcing and then insourcing programming work. Outsourcing never works as well as its proponents claim it will, for a variety of reasons. One significant reason, however, is the loss of knowledge. When things inevitably go wrong, you have outsourced not only your work but your knowledge to a third party that simply does not care as much as your employees do about your company. You may think you can keep senior people, but people change jobs. They retire. They get hit by lotteries. In a couple of years, a lot of institutional knowledge can and does walk out the door. And if you don’t have a means of training new senior people — and you don’t since you outsourced all of that work to a third party, so you have no junior people ready to become senior people — then you are screwed. To use the technical term. The same issue applies to creative work. Every bit of copywriting has a touch of the person who wrote it in it. That is what gives it any chance of being read and paid attention to by the people you need to buy your products or understand your instructions. If you rely on a word calculator, you get at best a middling imitation of human writing, one that no one is really going to read or engage with. And you lose the ability to create the senior people that really drive your work in a way that imitative AI machines mathematically cannot. Creativity is thinking. If you outsource your thinking to a system, then you pretty soon run out of people who can think. I am, as I mentioned, a programmer by trade. I appreciate that imitative AI is an interesting problem, and I can appreciate it as a toy. And maybe on the edges there are some things, like understanding natural language questions, that it can do better than existing systems. But these things can never be creative. And trying to use them in a creative field merely means that you gain something today for so, so much more pain tomorrow. I get that the OpenAI CTO needs to hype her products, but the way she does so demonstrates that her company understand neither creativity nor the value of learning, and cares even less about both. She’s just selling you bullshit in order to make her quarterly numbers. And while that may be a form of creativity, I still wouldn’t put it in the hands of ChatGPT. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/6/24/2248227/-Imitative-AI-Cannot-Make-You-Creative?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/