Not just makers but 'conceivers'. To take an idea and express it in some form is artistic expression. And that perhaps is the similarity. Also, I think emotion(passion) has a part to play because the similarity exists at an emotional level not at 'process' level.
I've got a similar insight from The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. The main theme of this book is creativity, and author explains why it is psychologically useful for creator to think about inspiration and help from higher beings like muses and angels.
I theorize (but cannot prove) that the processes underpinning creativity in the human mind are exactly the same statistical processes that ML models use.
Think about it: you live your life. You experience things. You experience art, and experience emotions or have interactions with other humans grounded in that art. You form connections with certain styles or techniques.
If you then turn around to create art, you form in your mind a general idea of what you want to create. You then draw on your past experiences to actually create the physical art. What process other than statistical extraction from your mind could it come from?
For sure I believe there are things that we don't understand about the human mind. I think the impact of drug use on art creation is very interesting, for example. It indicates that random chemical processes in our brains can play a large determining role in the actions we take (and in this case, the things that we create).
But to say that humans do not use some sort of inbaked statistical world model in the creative process seems wrong to me.
The really interesting in this is not the question of authorship (whoever is paying gets the credit; whomever is getting paid can maybe get gracious acknowledgement), its the concept/process duality. I.e.
1) Whether things are fully defined by concepts (and therefore symbolic representation) or whether there's something to objects that's fundamentally process-oriented; (this comes closer do Hubert Dreyfus' critique of AI)
2) Whether concepts themselves can be conceived as products of pure ideation, or whether there is the "concept-making process" of which concept-makers are technicians (this comes perhaps as a critique of pure conceptual art; for one, every pure mathematician knows you learn the stuff by doing and acquiring instincts), and, conversely
3) Whether meaningful things can be produced as pure process, fabrication, algorithm; or whether there's a necessary conceptual aspect to processes; whether an artisan carpenter or decades-experienced plumber have a concept built into their muscle memory and analytic instincts. (This comes close to programming: why, after so much process-development, is programming still so much a creators thing?)
I thoroughly enjoyed the book Inside The Box, which presents four mental models for creative problem solving. The core idea that creating rules can help creativity is a pattern toward which I think most technical people (including myself) feel averse, but actually can be beneficial when studied with an open mind.
I think that's it—these models are definitely capable of creating output not seen in the input, which we would define as human "creativity," and they can even combine concepts in novel ways, which is loosely what we call "innovation." But they are quite biased to create plausible output, which severely restricts their ability to create something interesting.
You can dial up the temperature, but this quickly pushes the output from "bland" to "totally unhinged."
> We do see that some people are capable of dealing with this type of challenge. There are specialists who simply “can make things work”. There is no rationale behind this, just the reputation. It sometimes appears to others that such individuals could be considered “weird”.
I'm pretty sure this is down to brain type. Creatives tend to have neurons further apart this results in both some downsides and positives. One of the positives is being able to think more laterally, making distant connections that others seem incapable of making.
What results is the ability to see a bigger picture. In reality, you're not seeing a bigger picture but instead a compressed picture, you only see the nodes you jump through and seemingly ignore everything else.
I do think there's some value in recognizing when people create something directly inspired by looking at how the brain works and trying to mimic it with hardware.
Whether or not that's what's happening here is another matter.
A distinction I read somewhere, that I think is useful, is that people tend to be either primarily conceptualist in their thinking, or they are empiricists who learn from experience.
Galenson's book Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity discusses this point extensively, in addition to being a pleasure to read on its own.
I love this idea that somehow creative people are somehow "special"; I really like the articles preface of "Creativity is a nebulous, murky topic that fascinates me endlessly — how does it work? What habits to creative people do that makes them so successful at creativity?"
Here is a good interview with Craig Wynett ("Chief Creativity Officer") at P&G, in which he attempts to explain how they at P&G are trying to approach creativity from a scientific approach:
> In this major and long-awaited study Arthur Koestler advances the theory that
all creative activities — the conscious and unconscious processes underlying
artistic originality, scientific discovery, and comic inspiration—have a basic
pattern in common, which he attempts to define.
This is mentioned in Alan Kay's OOPSLA97 talk.
> So I'm going to use a metaphor here for this talk which is drawn from wonderful book called The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler. Koestler was a novelist who became a cognitive scientist in his later years. And one of the great books he wrote was about what might creativity be. Learning, he realized that learning of course is an act of creation itself because something happens in you that wasn't there before and using the metaphor of thoughts as ants crawling on a plane, in this case, it's a pink, pink plane, and there's a lot of things you can do on a pink plane. You can have goals, you can choose directions, you can move along, but you're basically always in the pink context. And if you think about that, that means that progress in a fixed context is almost always a form of optimization because if you were actually coming up with something new, it wouldn't have been part of the rules or the context for what the pink plane is all about.
> So creative acts generally are ones that don't stay in the same context that they're in. So he says every once in a while, even though you've been taught carefully by parents and by school for many years, you have a blue idea, maybe when you were taking a shower, maybe when you're out jogging, maybe when you're resting in an unguarded moment.
> Suddenly that thing that you were puzzling about, wondering about, looking at appears to you in a completely different light as though it were something else. And Koestler said the emotional reaction to this comes basically in three forms, which is if you're telling a joke it's "haha", if you're doing science it's "aha", and if you're doing art it's "ah". He says, because in each case, something very similar as having a joke takes you down the garden path and then suddenly reveals it's about something else.
Agency is a key part of that spark, but we have done all sorts of research into agency and providing goal based agents into an AI model framework incorporating LLMs as well as other optimizers and solvers I think will provide the majority of that spark. The process of creativity depends on both internal agency and goal setting unmoored by external dictation and semantic synthesis of abductively reasoned concepts, with an aesthetic that feels into the goal based optimizer. These are things that can be simulated to the point that while there may be an uncanny valley somewhere it’ll be close enough to be hard to distinguish.
But I do wonder if the practical utility of such an entity is worth the amount of effort and capital required to build and sustain it. I suspect it’ll be more a novelty than a practical tool.
I was going to say the most quirkily/avant garde-like creative people are more successful than those who think inside the box. Though that may just be an opinion.
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