Creativity Without Taste

Humans Among the LLMs

The rise of LLM AIs has brought up some truly interesting questions: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be creative?

And lucky for you, I’ve got the answers right here.

Robots Robot

What is creativity?

It is not the creation of ideas ex nihilo. Creativity is the slicing and dicing and remixing of existing ideas to make new ones. The best artists borrow and steal.

And when it comes to this mechanism of creativity, AI excels.

It can slice. It can dice. Like a veggie chopper, but for words.

Humans Judge

What makes humans unique among the beasts is not mere intellect or imagination – animals and machines have those to some degree.

Humans have the capacity and authority to make judgments, and they have it to degrees that animals and robots do not (see Genesis 1-3 and Proverbs).

“They Have No Taste”

AI is good at making ideas. It can pump out ideas all day long faster than you can.

AI is no good at judging whether its ideas are any good.

When you see impressive AI-generated content, remember: a human curated that, decided it was worth sharing. It is the human that has the taste. Or at least they should.

AI has no taste, no originality, no judgment. It can create, but it cannot discern.

As Steve Jobs said: “They just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste.”