Innovation itself is a copycat process. It is always carried out by aggregating and using previously learned or acquired processes and tools.<p>The harder it is to copy the innovative process in a given domain, and the greater the number and magnitude of fundamental rules that gatekeep the definition of “success” in successful innovation, the harder it is to innovate in that domain.<p>AI is moving up the creativity ladder from low copying difficulty and low definition-of-success creative innovation to progressively more difficult and high definition-of-success creativity. There’s no reason to believe it will stop.<p>When you say AI can’t be creative, because of its predictive and copycat nature, you’re saying the same of humans. It just becomes a semantic argument with little substance. At some point, when AI makes a mind-bending discovery on its own, before making a mind-bending discovery every day, no one will be arguing over AI’s capacity to innovate anymore.<p>Footnote: The copycat nature of innovation is why it is so sequential. When copying is all you’re doing, it’s hard to leapfrog. All the prerequisites for an innovation must be achieved first, before they themselves are iterated on to push the innovative frontier. When a prerequisite is leapfrogged, it isn’t a true prerequisite, and clever use of ur-prerequisites proves to be enough to assemble the innovation. Clever copy and pasting is copying nonetheless. Even cleverness may be copied :) National, institutional, and familial cultures often systematize different types of cleverness, depending on their objective function. When they face an external shock, they often attempt to copy and internalize some cultural firmware from their opponents/other third parties, or modify their own firmware in the same way that they always do, just with a greater degree of urgency - another copy and pasted trope, with a cartoonishly concrete outline that Pixar can show you in a movie created using its systematized creative process.<p>Our most impressive and fundamental innovations are coming out of literal systems - university systems and corporate R&D systems, with rules, processes, and quotas. Even the diversity of Turkish cuisine is the result of systematized culinary innovation in the Ottoman imperial kitchen. Now pass me a plate of copy pasta because that’s the only kind of pasta that exists.<p>Here’s a scary thought: For millions of years, humans did nothing other than hunt, cook, sleep, draw stick figures, and communicate about hunting, cooking, and drawing stick figures.<p>Those were humans with the same brains as us (if we met them we’d think they’re quite stupid - which is a testament to how much of our intelligence is embedded in learned processes).<p>Is GPT-4 really that far off from their level of intelligence and creativity? This is not a rhetorical question, and your answer has direct implications for your own intelligence, because, again, you have the same hardware.<p>Raising a caveman to be smart is an easier problem to solve than raising a monkey to be smart.