[jackbrookes]

> LLMs are really only capable of combining different things into output

> The magic and absurdity of life is a necessary thing to create such works.

These two points seem slightly conflicting. Why if a human is truly more creative than AI, must it experience "the magic and absurdity of life" if it can be creative without "combining things into output"? Is a creative human then just not splicing and recombining their experiences into their creative output? And therefore, if an AI had more data that mirrors that experience in some way would it be sufficiently creative to create something "truly original"?

My view is that intelligence and creativity is all just purely recombination. AI can do that well just as humans can. The gap is that the data humans have access to is much more analogue, emotional, and grounded in the real world compared to the data that AI is currently trained on.

[snakeboy]

> And therefore, if an AI had more data that mirrors that experience in some way would it be sufficiently creative to create something "truly original"?

An important distinction seems to lie in a human having original experiences to draw from, while an AI has only "data that mirrors" experiences.

[exe34]

> while an AI has only "data that mirrors" experiences.

True for a lot of current AI. With more robotic bodies, loads more access to cameras/audio/satellite/science measurements, an AI can have original experience on a level that can only be described as god-like compared to humans.

[kraai]

You could argue AI already partly has access to these measurements. You could easily tap into smart sensor data etc, same voor video/audio etc.

The part that AI can't (yet) truly replicate is 'feelings/emotions'. Experiences such feeling dread, loneliness, happiness. Or being anxious, nervous or having goosebumps. You can describe all these states but they are differently experienced for each individual and also dependent on each unique situation.

Ofcourse this also then comes down to how you exactly define emotions.

[exe34]

We don't know that Claude doesn't feel dread when it looks at my code. To be fair, these emotional circuits are the result of evolving in various environments. AI might well have completely new emotions that we just can't comprehend.

[keiferski]

And at this point you’re far off into science fiction, and beyond reasonable discussion of this.

Even then, it’s not really clear to me that an android with the exact appearance of a person will have the same experiences. They aren’t biological creatures with millions of years of evolution behind them.

[EGG_CREAM]

If it has a subjective viewpoint, i.e. sentience. Otherwise it still doesn’t actually experience any of those things, and can’t tell actually you what it’s like to experience those things. It can give you the data readings though.

[brazzy]

Wouldn't it be funny if they missing thing is actually the body, and having one to give the subjective viewpoint something to center on directly leads to emerging sentience?

Though I think there's at least one more important thing missing, namely the ability to form memories - to incorporate recent context into the model's weights. I don't think it's a coincidence that this is a very complex process in humans as well (involving sleep and dreams as neccessary mechanisms).

[rahimnathwani]

ChatGPT has had more conversations than you or I have. And it's conversed with people from a wider range of backgrounds in a wider range of situations.

[perrygeo]

Billions of conversations. Zero lived experience.

The difference is huge. An LLM conversation can contain within it a batshit crazy model of the world and still produce a plausible stream of tokens. No skin in the game. If you don't test your ideas against reality, you don't have a model of reality; you have a model of written human thought. It's critical to understand the difference.

[keiferski]

And? Can you tell me what it feels like to eat a hamburger by asking a thousand people about it?

[everdrive]

I think this is actually a tough one. Yes, I agree that an LLM can never experience this. But -- when a real human needs to translate that experience back into words, it can actually do so just fine.

In other words, when a real human needs to translate an experience into words to share it, A LOT of information is lost. The LLM might actually be better-suited for the the task in your example, even if the point you were driving at stands.

[keiferski]

I don't think it's all that difficult. Language is not a 1-1 match to reality. Ergo any entity which is inherently language-only, will fail to accurately describe the experience.

[brazzy]

Not if the only result you can judge is also language-only, and the entity has access to a large corpus of descriptions produced by people who have had the experience.

[lordnacho]

That's what we all did in school, didn't we?

Nobody did any original research, you didn't discover gravity, and you didn't participate in any historically significant events.

Yet we say that people who have been through education know about such things.

[keiferski]

That is descriptive knowledge. Not firsthand qualia.

You may know every detail of the American Civil War, from every book ever written on the topic. You may read every journal from every person that wrote one about it.

You do not have firsthand knowledge of what it was like to participate in the war. Any assumption of that knowledge is a (false) generalization of what you think a person “would have thought or felt” based on contemporary ideas of the personality, psychology, etc. Reading a journal entry about a soldier seeing his comrade killed is not equivalent to actually having that experience yourself.

[wild_egg]

So only people who have fought in wars can write novels about fighting in wars?

[vitorfblima]

He probably could tell you something about it, based on other people's experiences. Doesn't mean he would actually know what he was talking about.

[keiferski]

He could tell you a collection of descriptions. Not actual knowledge firsthand.

Does reading an infinite number of cookbooks mean you know what the ingredients in each taste like?

[rahimnathwani]

Yes, of course.

[keiferski]

That’s a pretty lacking theory of knowledge. How can you know what taste is, if you’re never tasted anything?

If you read a thousand books about living in New York City, is that the same thing as the experiential knowledge that comes from living there in person? I certainly don’t think so.

[rahimnathwani]

keiferski didn't ask for a theory of knowledge. You're moving the goalposts.

[JKCalhoun]

"Is a creative human then just not splicing and recombining their experiences into their creative output?"

I do think so. The difference is that, even apart from synthesis, the creative human knows how to filter out the shit ideas from the clever, subtle ones—LLMs seem to just run with the first…um, thought that… um, comes out of their head.

I suspect knowing that you've on to something special probably does require "human experience", woe, melancholy, "the human condition", reflecting on the brevity of life…

[wanzg]

> My view is that intelligence and creativity is all just purely recombination. AI can do that well just as humans can. The gap is that the data humans have access to is much more analogue, emotional, and grounded in the real world compared to the data that AI is currently trained on.

Yes!

Aside from the more fundamental questions about the nature of cognition and what constitutes intelligence, there's a practical matter: humans have life to learn from. We have a lifetime of persistent memories, an identity, a social life, physical interactions with the world of many qualitatively different kinds, and we're taken on a lifelong journey into different studies, workplaces, and living environments by the biological need to survive.

Even if human creativity is in some sense also recombinative at its core, we have a very different set of inputs from LLMs. Even under the (almost certainly false) assumption that human condition is basically similar in structure to an LLM, we should expect some differences in outputs based on these profound differences in inputs.

[SkyBelow]

>These two points seem slightly conflicting. Why if a human is truly more creative than AI, must it experience "the magic and absurdity of life" if it can be creative without "combining things into output"?

I agree, yet I also think AI is extremely limited in terms of new creativity.

My guess is that humans operate on some deeper level. Much like the grokking model example where it easily trained on the training data, but only later did it really start to understand the deeper problem space and 'grok' the problem, I think LLMs are doing something similar with human thought. LLMs can throw more compute, but they are still lacking some introspection/drive that leads to the better creativity of humans. Grokking this from the training data might not be possible, or it might take some fundamentally different approach, or even an imperfection in humans that LLMs don't have (ego/drive?).

This isn't to say that LLMs could never do it, but the cost to do so might require magnitudes more scale in training times and size. Or it could be in the next model released. Or maybe they already can, but that gets trained out in favor of overall more general correctness accross all domains.

[whilenot-dev]

I think you're just neglecting the fact that LLMs only exist in the virtual world, whereas we're interacting with a world that's richer and has much more to offer. The virtual world is still just a mere subset of our world, but whether we want to perceive it as such is up to each individual. It certainly feels like you're conflating digital with analog, and a digital signal can still only approximate an analog one.

I still doubt that we have the knowledge to describe all of our human desires as mere results of our brain interacting with the nervous system either. There are many processes going on besides analysis and synthesis. If I plan on doing something extraordinary, I don't only sit there, think, and try to rearrange some pieces from memory. I'll go look around, touch, taste, re-explore and expand the perception my environment has to offer. Further, my perception can vary by the minute and I could even try to bring in a touch of chance whenever I feel like.

Wittgenstein's "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" might be fitting here, yet language still continues to evolve.

[JKCalhoun]

"…LLMs only exist in the virtual world, whereas we're interacting with a world that's richer and has much more to offer."

I have a gamer friend that believes, having played 100's of 1st-person games, that he has had rich experiences because of it.

I reflect back on a day my family and I set out to hike through Arches National Park (still a Monument at the time, I believe) and the heat was such that my oldest daughter seemed in danger of going into runaway heat exhaustion. I began to panic as we were so far along on the hike already that even returning to where we parked seemed to pose danger for her.

There was little to no "coverage" (shade) along the trail and the heat and sun were intense that day—we had passed almost nothing. Finding the smallest of bushes to provide minimal shade for her, I scouted ahead on the trail to look for some kind of larger area where there would be enough shade, perhaps a breeze even, to allow her to bring her core body temperature back down.

Fortunately I found just that. (And it turned out that, in the news later, two hikers within a few hundred miles of us had in fact died that day as it was a record heat wave for the area.)

I think somehow that me and my daughters experiences that day, when actual death was perhaps on the table, was something a "virtual environment" can never really offer.

[keiferski]

Is a creative human then just not splicing and recombining their experiences into their creative output?

No, they aren't. I'm not sure why it's such a popular narrative that all art is just some kind of recombination of existing things; it's not. Actual lived experiences are unique and impact what is created. Novels written by people in post-Revolutionary France are not the same as novels written by post-WW1 France. Events in history shape culture and introduce new ideas and experiences that weren't there before.

The gap is that the data humans have access to is much more analogue, emotional, and grounded in the real world compared to the data that AI is currently trained on.

That's the problem with your argument, right here. Emotions are not merely portable "data," and framing this way is a problem from the start.

I don't think you get human experiences without actually being human. The most perfect LLM copy of a mind is just the copy of externalized output.

[card_zero]

It's often said that creativity involves reuse because that's clearly part of the process. It's like a warning against another narrative, where a reclusive genius outputs great works made from scratch, without being part of culture. Yet there's some truth to both. The thing is to be inspired by the culture and then be defiantly original and work away stubbornly in private and also talk to your peers and your audience. It reminds me of how we used to play as kids: oh you're doing that thing? I'm gonna do that thing too ... when you see the big reveal, you're gonna be very impressed! I'm doing it differently! Look at how I'm doing your thing that you came up with!

[JKCalhoun]

"I'm not sure why it's such a popular narrative that all art is just some kind of recombination of existing things; it's not."

I would like to see art that was "created in a vacuum" so to speak. I am not aware of any. A first time poet who had never read any poetry or prose or heard a tale told? A painter who had been blind since birth and just handed a canvas, oils?

(To be pedantic, the person you quoted said art was recombining their experiences which you took as existing things.)