Sure, but so can pure randomness, for the same reason. It is creative in the literal sense, but not in the ineffable sense that humans tend to describe in humans.
Well put! Well, the first sentence is -- I think there's ample evidence that chatbots are creative in the same manner as humans, for the simple reason that they speak coherently. I'm sure we all remember pre-2023 chatbots, which were cute but ultimately produced gibberish; the current chatbots reach the same limits if given a hard enough task, which I think is fantastic evidence that they are ineffably creative before that limit.
In Chomsky's words, quoting Wilhelm von Humboldt:
Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation. The normal use of language and the acquisition of language depend on what Humboldt calls the fixed form of language, a system of generative processes that is rooted in the nature of the human mind and constrains but does not determine the free creations of normal intelligence or, at a higher and more original level, of the great writer or thinker...
The many modern critics who sense an inconsistency in the belief that free creation takes place within – presupposes, in fact – a system of constraints and governing principles are quite mistaken; unless, of course, they speak of “contradiction” in the loose and metaphoric sense of Schelling, when he writes that “without the contradiction of necessity and freedom not only philosophy but every nobler ambition of the spirit would sink to that death which is peculiar to those sciences in which that contradiction serves no function.” Without this tension between necessity and freedom, rule and choice, there can be no creativity, no communication, no meaningful acts at all.
You're absolutely right - and to identify the creation within randomness is also a form of creativity. Not all humans create (and identify) with the same methodologies!
In hindsight, I wish I’d included the disclaimer that I have creative pursuits (of the ineffable variety) which leverage creative tools in the more literal sense (not AI, not purely random either). I don’t mean to disparage the entire class of machine-generated creation per se.
But I do think that there is an important distinction between incorporating it in some form into a person’s expression, versus being the whole of the expression. Even if that incorporation is mere curation, at least that imbues some semblance of meaning, to someone capable of experiencing meaning.
And perhaps that’s a snobbish perspective. Maybe it deserves reexamination.
