Isabelle Levent

The deepest cases of creativity involve someone’s thinking something which, with respect to the conceptual spaces in their minds, they  couldn’t  have thought before. The supposedly impossible idea can come about only if the creator changes the pre-existing style in some way. It must be tweaked, or even radically transformed, so that thoughts are

Instead, I’d like us to ask: in whose voice do our machines write? What voices do they obfuscate? Where do their words come from? In short, I’d like us to ask questions about power, and the ways in which it functions through and around language. 

Creativity is the ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are  new ,  surprising , and  valuable . 

The fact that adding keywords like  Let’s Think Step By Step , adding “Greg Rutkowski”, prompt weights, and even negative prompting are still so enormously effective, is a sign that we are nowhere close to perfecting the “language” part of “large language models”.

Whatever the size of the space, someone who comes up with a new idea within that thinking-style is being creative in the second, exploratory, sense. If the new idea is surprising not just in itself but as an example of an unexpected general  type , so much the better.

For a computer to make a subtle combinational joke, never mind to assess its tastefulness, would require, first, a data-base with a richness comparable to ours, and, second, methods of link-making (and link-evaluating) comparable in subtlety with ours.