Is Human Creativity Really Different From AI?

 It is clear that chatGPT and other generative forms of artificial intelligence have catapulted into the general public’s consciousness and created a mixture of fear, glee and unlimited pontificating.  The usual suspects who leap onto technology bandwagons are, of course, leading the charge.  They have dumped crypto and found a new, even sexier infatuation.

 

The prospect of generative AI saturating our society with fake news, deep fake videos and photos and other chaos-creating content is disturbing, to say the least.  One doubts that there is any means to stem that onslaught and the task of distinguishing truth from lie will grow progressively more challenging. 

 

But in addition to that inevitable scourge, there is the somewhat dispiriting prospect of people using chatbots to do most if not all of their creative work – writing emails, letters and essays; creating videos or photo albums; coming up with poems, songs and melodies.  One can only imagine the nightmare for school teachers and professors in trying to assess the capabilities of their students.  Or perhaps the only skill necessary or assessed in the future will be the ability to guide the generative AI to whatever end product one desires?

 

We are reassured by some pundits that human creativity will not be in jeopardy because we are uniquely capable of innovation and modes of thought that computers cannot replicate.  But is this really true?  AI learns from data that it consumes.  Don’t humans do the same?  Isn’t our entire life a consumption of data?  We use the books we read, the music we heard, the conversations we had, the movies and series we watched to construct new thoughts, new ideas, and these are the sources for all our creative output.

 

It is true that there are subtleties to human thought and feeling that are more difficult to imagine being mastered by AI – irony, humor, sarcasm, empathy, sorrow, ecstasy, to name a few.  But these are also acquired over years of training and interaction.  A newborn has no empathy, no irony, no sarcasm.  Would it be so difficult for a computer to likewise be introduced to all of these and become conversant with them?

 

Most of us would like to believe that there is some aspect of the human brain or ‘spirit’, something beyond the purely material realm, that gives us our ‘humanity’ and our moral and ethical compass.  But others are at peace with the idea that human beings are simply incredibly complex and beautiful machines.

 

I suspect that the next few years will bring us the rather depressing realization that human creativity is not all that amazing after all.  We will find that a chatbot can come up with a catchy tune and lyric that rivals the Beatles or Cole Porter, or a novel that would make F. Scott Fitzgerald envious.

 

But then again, maybe after all is said and done, we will find that there is that certain ineffable genius of human creativity that is missing in the deluge of content created by generative AI.  And we may find ourselves all the poorer for having allowed it to dominate our world.  Who can say?

Some Thoughts on Immigration and Its Downside

An academic study released in 2019 found that the children of poor immigrants succeeded in climbing the income ladder much better than the children of poor native-born parents.  This was not only true for immigrants from India, Asia and Europe, but also for those from Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, countries former President Trump labelled ‘shithole’ countries.

The authors theorized that the tendency for these immigrants to live in areas where there are more employment opportunities as well as their willingness to move wherever new opportunities arise might explain some of this difference.  There is also the fact that in some cases, the immigrant parents take jobs at a lower level than they had in their mother country and are not really at a comparable socioeconomic level to the poor in our country.  This may significantly impact the probability of success for their children.

 

In addition to the so-called poor immigrants who achieve social mobility you also have a significant number of immigrants who arrive in the USA as students or skilled workers to fill jobs that might not otherwise be filled.  This is especially true in areas of technology and science.

 

The USA has always prided itself on attracting the best and brightest from across the world.  Our universities eagerly pursue bright international students who are willing to pay the tuition or who are particularly capable, and most of those will stay and work in the USA.  They are also more likely to pursue postgraduate education than native born students and then progress into academia. A whopping 22% of post-secondary education teachers are immigrants!

 

In a world that is beginning to experience population decline in most industrialized nations, immigration is a method to counteract this trend and sustain economic growth.  However, this solution for the so-called first world comes at what certainly must be a high cost for the non-industrialized countries. 

 

For not only are these nations losing their best aspiring students and skilled workers to the lure of the industrialized world, but it is highly probable that the poor emigrants that flee these countries are in most cases a highly motivated and industrious group that constitute a major loss for the mother country as well.  Is it any surprise that many countries remain impoverished and in a failed state when their most valuable resource is being siphoned off?

 

Worldwide competition for people may contribute to innovation and economic prowess in the winning countries, but it also exacerbates many of the problems that plague our increasingly globalized world.  There was a time when the USA could remain blissfully unaffected by the chaos and deprivation outside its borders, but that time is past.  If we cannot find a way to help developing nations retain their best, brightest and most motivated then we will all ultimately suffer.