As a non-expert, ChatGPT appears to me to be a compression of the internet with interesting mash ups. Am I wrong? Creativity to me is about going outside a given search space, about disruptive, non-linear change. ChatGPT is about a constrained search space that is unbelievably large. I would love to hear the reasoning for why my thinking is incorrect so I can better understand the creative potential and limitations of ChatGPT.
Assuming the definition of creative as being "related to original ideas", of course ChatGPT isn't creative. It is quite literally a mechanism to rehash previously expressed words, and thus ideas.<p>Now, ChatGPT is able to rehash previously expressed words - and possibly combine those with other previously expressed words, so as to create combinations it has been prompted to create - at a velocity and with broader sources that were not previously imaginable.
Does it matter to you how you got there, or do you only care about the result? If the former - chatGPT is not creative (but maybe we aren't either) - if the latter - ChatGPT is (but so can be a very simple dumb code if it runs for long enough).<p>I could write a program that will generate all possible programs of given size one by one and run that program till the internal memory state starts repeating. I start with programs with memory size N, let's say 10 bytes, generate and run all of them, then go to N+1 and so on.<p>Given enough time and memory - that program will write every possible batch computer program smaller than K and solve every possible problem of Kolmogorov complexity ~K.<p>Assume we have a computer fast enough for this to be practical. Is my program creative? It just bruteforces programming. But eventually it will get the result you want.<p>Creativity isn't well defined without specifying the hardware, time and memory constraints.
It's a very interesting question. I'm not sure I think that there is a "creative" / "not creative" binary dichotomy though. Seems more like a continuum to me. In which case, I think I'd say ChatGPT (and its ilk) <i>are</i> creative... to some degree. Quantifying that would be tough though.<p>This whole thing does though, as we see in other threads here already, lead to some interesting questions around "what even is creativity" and "how creative are we humans", etc. One might also fairly ask to what extent creativity is <i>truly</i> a desirable thing at all! I'm sure we've all sat in meetings where a co-worker presented a truly "creative" approach to a problem, where said solution was as mind-numblingly stupid as it was creative. :-)
If everything in the training data is black or white, and ChatGPT is producing shades of gray, I'd call painting blue creative.<p>Sure it may output never-seen-before shades of gray, b/w polka dots & interesting dithering patterns. Does it paint yellow, purple, IR or UV, blow glass art, sculpture clay or spray graffiti on concrete? Doubtful.