[TeMPOraL]

Whatever the underlying "real" pattern is, doesn't really matter. We don't need to represent it. People learn to understand it implicitly, without ever seeing some formal definition spelled out - and learn it well enough that if you take M works to classify as "creative" or "not", then pick N people at random and ask each of them to classify each of the works, you can expect high degree of agreement.

LLMs aren't leaning what "creativity" is from first principles. They're learning it indirectly, by being trained to reply like a person would, literally, in the fully general meaning of that phrase. The better they get at that in general, the better they get at the (strict) subtask of "judging whether a work is creative the same way a human would" - and also "producing creative output like a human would".

Will that be enough to fully nail down what creativity is formally? Maybe, maybe not. On the one hand, LLMs don't "know" any more than we do, because whatever the pattern they learn, it's as implicit in their weights as it is for us. On the other hand, we can observe the models as they learn and infer, and poke at their weights, and do all kinds of other things that we can't do to ourselves, in order to find and understand how the "deeper superstructure behind these problems" gets translated into abstract structures within the model. This stands a chance to teach us a lot about both "these problems" and ourselves.

EDIT:

One could say there's no a priori reason why those ML models should have any structural similarity to how human brains work. But I'd say there is a reason - we're training them on inputs highly correlated with our own thoughts, and continuously optimizing them not just to mimic people, but to be bug for bug compatible with them. In the limit, the result of this pressure has to be equivalent to our own minds, even if not structurally equivalent. Of course the open question is, how far can we continue this process :).

[sleepytree]

As far as I can tell, I think you are interchanging the ability to recognize creativity with the ability to be creative. Humans seem to have the ability to make creative works or ideas that are not entirely derivative from a given data set or fit the criteria of some pre-existing pattern.

That is why I mentioned Kuhn and paradigm shifts. The architecture of LLMs do not seem capable of making lateral moves or sublations that are by definition not derivative or reducible to its prior circumstance, yet humans do, even though the exact way we do so is pretty mysterious and wrapped up in the difficulties in understanding consciousness.

To claim LLMs can or will equal human creativity seems to imply we can clearly define not only what creativity is, but also consciousness and also how to make a machine that can somehow do both. Humans can be creative prima facie, but to think we can also make a computer do the same thing probably means you have an inadequate definition of creativity.

[TeMPOraL]

I wrote a long response wrt. Kuhn under your earlier comment, but to summarize it here: I believe LLMs can make lateral moves, but they will find it hard to increment on them. That is, they can make a paradigm-shifting creative leap itself, but they can't then unlearn the old paradigm on the spot - their fixed training is an attractor that'll keep pulling them back.

As for:

> As far as I can tell, I think you are interchanging the ability to recognize creativity with the ability to be creative.

I kind of am, because I believe that the two are intertwined. I.e. "creativity" isn't merely an ability to make large conceptual leaps, or "lateral moves" - it's the ability to make a subset of those moves that will be recognized by others as creative, as opposed to recognized as wrong, or recognized as insane, or recognized as incomprehensible.

This might apply more to art than science, since the former is a moving target - art is ultimately about matching subjective perceptions of people, where science is about matching objective reality. A "too creative" leap in science can still be recognized as "creative" later if it's actually correct. With art, whether "too creative" will be eventually accepted or forever considered absurd, is unpredictable. Which is to say, maybe we should not treat these two types of "creativity" as the same thing in the first place.