Many interesting narratives populate the philosophical discourse around artificial intelligence, not the least of which is the potential of artificial intelligence to replace humans in different endeavors.
My own son's birth and my observation of every faculty he has developed – his ability to recognize objects, utter sounds, and crawl around as an infant, and now, as a toddler, his ability to ask questions about things, find new ways of looking at things around him, learn multiple languages with ease, and colour, draw, paint, recognize things – it has all been incredible to witness.
With my niece and nephew earlier, I saw a similar evolution of the mind, spirit and the growth of the person and the persona in each case. This is surely the case with all humans – we're somehow carrying within ourselves a creative force that is constantly at play.
Learning Creativity
Greene makes the point that creative people learn creativity by trying, by exploring, by building options for themselves to express themselves in some context, and by confronting ideas, and crystallizing them.
Do we humans all experience the equivalents of prompts that are multi-sensory in nature?
Can the sound of the wind, or a song, or a noise be our prompts that set of thoughts, ideas and creative output, just as text prompts set of LLM hallucinations? I would argue, from experience, that this is quite true.
How often have we not been nudged by some situation or moved by it that a song we think is relevant has popped into our head? How often have we written, composed, played or worked feverishly through some source of inspiration? Are all these unalloyed with the sensory architecture around human life? I believe this may not be the case.
Situational Creativity
It seems to be, then, that much of human creativity is also situational, and a due to a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. And this is to be expected – we're a part of the universe, not separate from it.
It isn't as though what is within our skin is somehow separate from the world around us – we are made of the same stuff as the stars are, as Carl Sagan may have said. Perhaps this is as good a reason as any to continue to nurture human creativity and originality.
Regardless of what you may think about using ChatGPT to generate an image, perhaps there is value in learning to draw, or paint. Despite using Suno to build new songs, or Cursor to write code, you may find, in the words of Richard Feynman, a pleasure in finding things out, in keeping one's mind engaged, and putting to use that incredible result of evolution – the human brain.
The Biological Advantage
The big difference in all this is of course that each of us reading this actually has a brain, as opposed to AI systems, which are code running on a piece of hardware. The more we engage our brains in different tasks, the stronger they get, in some Lamarckian way, and subsequent generations of humans stand to gain from these minor improvements our brains, bodies and minds.
Indeed, it isn't that our brains alone do the thinking – we have a nervous system that extends right through our bodies, and our brain stems are important participants in day-to-day intelligent decision making of an ingrained kind of response – Kahnemann's Type 1 and Type 2 classification comes to mind.
The Future of Human Creativity
So, do our bodies, brains and our "wet ware" compare well with AI? Perhaps they do, and perhaps they fall short in some ways. And yet, there is reason for biological intelligence, and its highest expression – human creativity – to be nurtured and to stick around a few more centuries at least, because who knows?
We may improve, evolve over generations based on the things we spend time on, and surprise ourselves at how much better we can still get at many, many things.