[perching_aix]

A couple days ago I saw a tweet that described how to remove an element from an array in O(1) time instead of O(n). The key to it was identifying that for the purpose the given array was being used for, it could be unordered / not fully ordered, and it would not be an issue.

This way, it was possible to simply replace the element with the last array element, then decrease the size of the array by one. I'd say that's pretty creative: whoever came up with this was able identify what can be traded off to make the previously impossible, possible, unlocking new scales and possibilities.

In practice, I'd say creativity is often being able to manifest people's qualia in some unprecedented way. For example, say you're experimenting in your DAW, and discover a pretty cool sound. You identify the ways it can be used to emote and then utilize it in a work. If you really stumbled upon a sound that a lot of people find as emotive as you did, you just did something creative: it's as if you translated the qualia of an emotion into sound.

This qualia to manifestation is what's behind creativity in all of senses of the word I believe. In my previous example, discovering that orderedness is not actually a strict requirement, and (ab)using that to significantly alter the scaling of such an action is creative, because it undoes the notion that orderedness is a requirement. It goes against what's natural, but in a way that becomes extremely natural and indispensable once realized.

I think, in that way, current AIs are trained to be uncreative, since being creative inherently requires experimentation that is unaligned with the normal.

[IshKebab]

> whoever came up with this was able identify what can be traded off to make the previously impossible, possible, unlocking new scales and possibilities.

In fairness, that is an extremely standard trick so it's reasonably unlikely that the author came up with it themselves.

[almostuseful]

But the first time someone came up with that idea it was an act of creativity.

[IshKebab]

Yeah I agree. Though it is hard to tell if LLMs are capable of "easy" creativity like that though because anything that easy has already been done many times in its training set.

You've have to invent some new domain I guess and see if it could be creative within that domain. Difficult to think of a good test though.

[drzzhan]

Thank you for your answer! TIL a new word: qualia I like your two examples. They have different perspectives. Though I must say the "qualia to manifestation" is still a bit abstract for me now. I'll keep them in mind.