An interesting article on AI and creativity which asks us to reconsider how we determine ownership of ideas to refer to later perhaps:
For me, the salient points in the article were:
“This raises a crucial question: how much of any AI’s “creativity” is the creativity of the human coder rather than the code? Cameras heralded a new age of human creativity that can be seen displayed today in art museums across the world. But no one assigns the camera any part in the act of creativity.
But that is an imperfect analogy. Humans are machines running the instructions of a code, our DNA. Our parents are responsible for that code, yet we don’t regard ourselves as a mere vessel for the creativity of our parents. Part of how a child differentiates itself from its parents comes from its unique interaction with its environment. This interaction also shapes our creative abilities.”
and
“To answer that question, we must first ask what drives our own urge for artistic creation. And for me, that is bound up with the hard problem of consciousness: the difficulty of explaining the true nature of felt experience in ourselves and other sentient beings. Because it is impossible to get inside each other’s heads to experience what another person’s pain or ecstasy feels like, we create works of art as a kind of functional MRI scan to reveal our conscious world and share it with others. A novel or a musical composition or a painting is our best way to help gain access to another person’s mind.
I can’t prove it, but I wonder whether true creativity and consciousness emerged at the same time in the human species. Perhaps only when we had consciousness did we start to wonder what was going on in the minds of others and want to share our own internal worlds – and begin to express ourselves creatively. If so, I think that true creativity in machines will only happen when they have a conscious world they want to convey to us.” (du Sautoy, 2019)
du Sautoy also ends with a reference to Marcel Duchamp’s urinal which triggered a century-long conversation which is still going on about what art might be.
Downloaded from the New Scientist Magazine: “Duchamp: Fountain, 1917. Marcel Duchamp’s readymade sculpture, ‘Fountain,’ signed by R. Mutt, 1917/Alamy” (du Sautoy, 2019)
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24232292-000-true-ai-creativity-is-coming-and-will-reveal-the-minds-of-machines/ (Possibly behind a paywall)