These days, there’s a lot of handwringing about how artificial intelligence – and especially Large Language Models like ChatGPT - will transform creative activities like writing, making music and designing visual images. The immediate concern is protecting the intellectual property of the artists who’ve created original work, now that LLMs are scraping the internet for vast amounts of data to feed their sophisticated AI systems. But there’s a more subtle question as well: How original is the creative work of humans in the first place? Or to put it another way, are novelists just remixing and recombining the texts they’ve read throughout their lives – and if so, is that much different from what LLMs are doing?
Is originality largely a myth that we’ve romanticized?I’ve been thinking about these questions as we air our show “What Sparks Creativity?” Our first segment explores the creative process through the perspectives of both a neuroscientist, Heather Berlin, and a novelist, Siri Hustvedt. They have a lot to say about the importance of being in a relaxed state, the connection between imagination and memory, and what originality really entails. And they propose their dream experiments for how scientists might understand how a new thought pops into our heads.
– Steve