Can Artificial Intelligence Replace Human Creativity - by Guido Sirna - Medium

01/05/2023, 22:39 Can Artificial Intelligence replace human creativity?
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Can Artificial Intelligence replace human

creativity?
An essay on Borges, Artificial Intelligence, DALL-E 2.0 and the future
of work.
“Can machines think?” is the question that Alan Turing introduced in 1950 when he
published “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in which he proposed the famous
Turing test as a criterion for determining whether or not a machine could be said to
think. In the paper, Turing also considers the question of whether or not machines
could ever actually surpass human intelligence, more specifically by posing a game
in which a human and a machine answer questions and the interrogator is unable to
distinguish between them (Turing, 1950).
A few years earlier the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges would write “Pierre
Menard, Author of the Quixote”, a piece of critical fiction that showed how two
different literary works could have the same text but not be the same work. In the
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work, Menard proposed to make a “translation” of the Quixote in an immersive way,

To make
recreating the work and the lifeMedium work, we log
of its original user data.line by line. Pierre Menard
author,
raises profound questionsPrivacy
about the nature of authorship, appropriation and
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interpretation (Lapidot et al., 1995).
For all these years, creativity was one of the last bastions of humanity. The reality,
however, is changing rapidly. Advances in artificial intelligence and machine
learning have not stopped, undergoing a paradigm shift from logic-based to agent-
oriented models (Wegner, 1997) and getting to the point of exposing clear limitations
in human intelligence (Gobet & Sala, 2019). In an attempt to answer Turing’s
question and the issues raised by Pierre Menard this essay will attempt to explain
what artificial intelligence is and if recent developments such as DALL-E 2 can
eventually replace human creativity.
The Automation of Creativity

To determine whether machines can think, it is first necessary to understand the
more encompassing concept of intelligence, defined by Mikalef & Gupta (2021) as
“the ability to interact, learn, adopt, and resort to information from experiences, as
well as to deal with uncertainty”. Within this scope, creativity is an extremely
attractive and ambiguous concept. What creativity is, what its limits are and how it
can be improved has been and still is extensively studied, but can generally be
defined as the “self-reconfiguring process under which solutions to a problem are
achieved, in a new and unexpected way” (De Garrido, 2021).

Figure 1. All these works were imagined and drawn by an artificial intelligence. DALL-E 2
can produce original, beautiful and coherent works from any text input (Ramesh et al.,
2022).
But creativity no longer seems to be a resource reserved for human genius. As with
other technological innovations in the past, AI and machine learning have brought
new opportunities and challenges. Thanks to these technologies, computer
programs are able to learn from large sets of input data and reinforce their learning
from experience, being able to create outputs such as music, literature, videos and
digital art that, according to De Garrido’s (2021) definition, are not foreseeable by
the people who developed the programs. This process by which machines can create
To make
new and original works with Medium
little work,
or no we log user
human data.
intervention can be considered
“algorithmic creativity” (Bonadio & McDonagh, 2020).
Figure 1. An example of an AI generative model in art creation with a degree of

supervision by the artist or developer (Mazzone & Elgammal, 2019).
But the conquest of creativity by machines has always been a particularly

challenging field. Could machines be creative? As Turing predicted in his paper,
machines would play the “imitation game,” producing responses that mimic human
behavior as closely as possible (Turing, 1950). From these definitions, all the
systems known today are focused on machines reproducing or representing human-
like behaviors from existing data sets. Diffusion models and contrastive models as
CLIP (Ramesh et al., 2022) emulate human learning mechanisms and ensure that
the results of the AI that fall under our parameters of coherence and acceptability
(Mikalef and Gupta, 2021, p. 3).
A dream without a dreamer

DALL-E 2, a neural network unveiled by OpenAI in April 2022 which succeeded the
model presented the previous year, seems to have pushed the boundaries in creative
algorithmic production and the implications may be astounding. The program not
only understands the relationship between images and the words we use to describe
them, but can generate creative works from abstract descriptions that could come
out of any artist’s imagination, such as “a corgi playing a flame throwing trumpet”,
with a degree of quality and novelty indistinguishable from human production.

According to its founders,ToDALL-E
make Medium
2 iswork, we log user data.
an important step toward the industry’s goal
of creating artificial general intelligence (AGI), a system that can achieve human
intelligence in a wide range of diverse tasks. DALL-E’s ability to associate words with
images and understand the attributes and relationships between objects is a major
breakthrough in generating an AI with this kind of understanding.
Figure 2. A high-level diagram of CLIP’s completely self-supervised text-to-image

generation process (Ramesh et al., 2022).
But while these systems appear to be significantly more autonomous, they still need
to interact with an external environment that they cannot control (Wegner, 1997) as
part of their training, and it can be argued that its creative potential is still largely
conditioned by human agency. In fact, DALL-E 2 inherits several human biases from
the training data, and its outputs can be manipulated. For example, the OpenAI
team has removed explicit content from the training data and banned violent,
hateful or adult content as part of its policies, and has even created certain filters to
prevent the reinforcement of social stereotypes with experimental results.
Still, these developments raise serious questions about human identity, as well as
difficult questions about the true nature of creativity and intelligence (Gobet & Sala,
2019). Can these creations be considered artistic productions? In defining art as a
mechanism for the production of beauty, Jauss & Shaw (1982) would say that the
spectator wants security: simple and pure things out of ambiguous objects that
escape their field of attention. Human intervention in this process is still necessary
to to reduce the ambiguities of AI and produce results that can be considered of

aesthetic value by other humans.
While the resulting images might be novel, surprising and puzzling, and may even
remind us of an artist’s technique, the artist’s intention to carry out that technique is
absent in the work (Mazzone & Elgammal, 2019). As Borges would say: a dream
without a dreamer.
Augmentation vs. Displacement

The potential uses of DALL-2 are vast. And while the advantages can be numerous,
the model is powerful enough to imagine the risks as well. Unlike Copilot, a tool
based on GPT-3 to help programmers to be more productive but unable to create a
complete program (Chen et al., 2021), DALL-E 2 is a tool that could help artists and
illustrators to be more creative, but can also create complete works. This new
paradigm may have a major impact on the labor market and may soon make many
current jobs less relevant.
On one side, graphic designers, app developers, media outlets, architects,

illustrators, and product designers could all use the tool for inspiration, new
creations, and editing, as mere artifacts or mechanisms for reducing complexity and
mediating coordination work (Carstensen & Sørensen, 1996). Hundreds of creative
tasks would become faster if it is possible to ask the AI to generate design material
for a new project, assets for a video game, unique and royalty-free photographs for a
project or to make the necessary modifications to an image avoiding hours of
editing.
On the other side, artists and professionals in the creative industries may feel
genuinely threatened. In recent years we have seen artists use AI to create new
works of art, but we have never seen AI produce a complete work on their own. The
nature of many jobs will change as these “imitation machines” begin to replace
human tasks with such efficiency that it is not possible to distinguish the results.
This could also represent a dangerous scenario where this technology is misused to
create offensive or false content that is indistinguishable from reality.

Figure 3. DALL-E 2’s output when entering the instruction to generate a flight attendant.
Conclusion
It is apparent that recent developments in AI signal a new kind of relationship
between humans and machines. New questions about human nature and the
meaning of creativity are being raised as machines acquire greater learning
capabilities, while at the same time generating new philosophical and ethical
questions: can a work produced by a computer be creative? If so, who is the author?
Should this algorithmic creativity be limited by humans? (Gobet & Sala, 2019)
On the question of creativity, some authors argue that algorithms are tools and not
artists (Hertzmann, 2018). But systems like DALL-E 2 have the ability to create new
works, to change, to make decisions based on past experience and to learn (Mazzone
& Elgammal, 2019) just as humans do. In light of this reality, new scenarios must be
considered where machines work in coordination with humans or rather work
independently (Gobet & Sala, 2019).
Today’s creative artificial intelligence systems have been created based on

observations, deductions and interpretations of human creative behavior (De
Garrido, 2021). Can machines really think, or are they simply artifacts that “imitate”
processes of human intelligence such as making decisions, recognizing images,
understanding texts and conceiving original creations? Is that not thinking?
If it hasn’t already, artificial intelligence may soon replace human creativity. But in
the meantime, they can be powerful supplements to human production. It will be up
to developers and decision makers to control risks so that these technologies are
brought to market responsibly.

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01/05/2023, 22:39 Can Artificial Intelligence replace human creativity?

| by Guido Sirna | Medium

To make Medium work, we log user data.

Guido Sirna Follow

May 18, 2022 · 9 min read · Listen SER PASS