"As a devout Catholic, Tolkien argued that only God is truly creative. I would replace God with Nature. What humans create, even art at its most transcendent, is a secondary creativity, reflecting God, or Nature, but always derivative."
From a physical sense, the universe is pretty boring. Yes, we are discovering new things all the time about the universe, but it has been plugging a long for billions of years in a predictable way. Life is the most interesting thing that has ever happened so far, the ability of living things to unevenly distribute entropy. Accelerating it in some aspects (food decay in the gut is faster than in a vacuum), and harvesting that energy to decrease entropy to create cells, etc.
Is AI doing the same? Burning coal to organize ones and zeros? Is that creative?
At its present level, I think it is creative at a very simple level. After I read "The Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" last year, my reaction was that was very unfair to parrots. Honestly, I feel like is is on the level of a slime mold. Slime molds are very interesting, exhibit goal-seeking behavior, and be used to solve complex problems as a kind of living analog computer. The other metaphor, suggested by your comment about rearranging 1s and 0s, might be RNA or DNA.
There are days when I think there is some creative spark in them. On other days I don't. I do not understand the technology well enough to know whether some actual evolution is possible without human intervention. If it is, then in some sense there is a creative spark. Without the ability to evolve, I would say it must remain imitative.
I wonder if we would know non-biological evolution if we saw it.
"As a devout Catholic, Tolkien argued that only God is truly creative. I would replace God with Nature. What humans create, even art at its most transcendent, is a secondary creativity, reflecting God, or Nature, but always derivative."
From a physical sense, the universe is pretty boring. Yes, we are discovering new things all the time about the universe, but it has been plugging a long for billions of years in a predictable way. Life is the most interesting thing that has ever happened so far, the ability of living things to unevenly distribute entropy. Accelerating it in some aspects (food decay in the gut is faster than in a vacuum), and harvesting that energy to decrease entropy to create cells, etc.
Is AI doing the same? Burning coal to organize ones and zeros? Is that creative?
At its present level, I think it is creative at a very simple level. After I read "The Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" last year, my reaction was that was very unfair to parrots. Honestly, I feel like is is on the level of a slime mold. Slime molds are very interesting, exhibit goal-seeking behavior, and be used to solve complex problems as a kind of living analog computer. The other metaphor, suggested by your comment about rearranging 1s and 0s, might be RNA or DNA.
There are days when I think there is some creative spark in them. On other days I don't. I do not understand the technology well enough to know whether some actual evolution is possible without human intervention. If it is, then in some sense there is a creative spark. Without the ability to evolve, I would say it must remain imitative.
I wonder if we would know non-biological evolution if we saw it.