The Meaning of Machine Creativity

For a long time there was a narrative that computers would only be good at automating routine tasks, leaving creativity to us humans. I never believed this because creativity isn’t some kind of magic but rather much of it is based on exploring variations either based on known rules or based on precedents. For example, I titled a post in 2016 “Machine Creativity: Possibly Sooner than Anticipated.” Also in my book The World After Capital, I have a section on the universality of computation that includes a few paragraphs on creativity.

Recently we have had several breakthroughs, first starting with large language models that can tell stories, and now with DALL-E2 and midjourney, two models that can generate amazing imagery based on textual input. For example, here is an image “imagined” by midjourney based on the prompt “Sailing across the alps”

It is mind-bending to sit with this image for a while. A machine created it and did so within a space of minutes, yet it is full of imagination and detail and could easily be on the cover of a book or the walls of a museum.

So what does it mean that we now clearly and demonstrably have creative machines?

First, more than ever it means that we need to come up with a new social contract. People who have earned a living with logo design, or illustration, or music composition, or code authoring, or any number of other creative pursuits are suddenly facing stiff competition from machines (related: here is another 2016 post on “Programming without Programmers”). In The World After Capital I have an section on the “lump of labor fallacy” versus Leontieff’s argument that humans are just a factor of production, much like horses were at one point. I am firmly in the camp that the central building block of a new social contract needs to be some form of Universal Basic Income.

Second, while I don’t believe that artificial general intelligence is imminent, we are definitely now finding ourselves on an accelerated timeline, relative to just a few years back. Humans still have a unique capability to reason and be creative over “open domains” or across vastly different domains. Also we humans can base our creativity on a deep understanding as opposed to the shallow approach taken by the models. But it would be silly to dismiss these latest models as just a parlor trick, as some have argued. What we are seeing now is profound. It is high time that we start getting serious about what it means to be human and how we should be treating other humans.

We are experiencing an extraordinary expansion of technological capabilities. If we can figure out how to get past our industrial age thinking, what comes next could be truly amazing. If you want my thoughts on that, I have pulled them together as a book: The World After Capital.