Why AI can't replace human creativity and never should

Khaleej Times

3 days ago

I have been negative about AI, or rather the large language models and hive-minds of underpaid desk-jockeys and migrants on computers forced to masquerade as chat-bots (look it up), while also being certain it will be worse for humanity than social media.
Those fears are bearing out with people using LLMs as therapists who don't have medical degrees and study pals who will lie and tell you what you want to hear if it keeps you engaged. Again, look it up, and do not use the same search engine unless it is to find another.
This isn't widely known or even understood, again thanks to social media chopping up society into little bite-sized pieces to get gobbled up by the endless churn of rich and powerful surrounded by sycophants seeking more money and power to fill a hole inside themselves. But it is a fact that these so-called artificial intelligences are being trained on stolen material, and generate their work based on that theft.
In the UK, this has reached a head with the government doubling down on plans to make it easier for these companies to steal original material, where the creator does not know to what extent they need to 'opt out' of having their work stolen. This in turn is due to a lack of AI transparency laws, but the fact of the matter is if I tell an LLM to make me a picture of one thing in the style of a specific artist, I know that the AI is going into its database of that artist's work to generate a composite of it and others into what I want made.
Because it isn't drawn, it is generated. Drawings, or writing for that matter, has stages. You pause, you edit, you back up and readjust based on feeling and emotion. You do all the things humans do about everything, primarily over-think, just to be dissatisfied at the result.
I experienced this first hand and even asked one LLM to try writing a column for me; it was not bad, but it was far from good because it had no life. I'm Gen-Z and a proud digital native, and there's a certain way of communicating that only people who grew up online have; that is, we talk in the exact same tone as we write. For me, just without the stutter.
In needing to emerge and find friends online, that connection between what I would say and how I would write it, is short. I can self-edit very well, and what comes to matter most is ensuring I am understood, rather than plastering words together emotionally, and if I feel good about it too bad for everyone else.
That is what all LLMs do; take the lowest common denominator of what was asked for and spit it out, because that is what its purpose is. Truly, LLMs are only digital machines; they would only be intelligent if they thought for themselves, which they do not, because they are incapable of recalling on past experiences or accessing memory through emotional triggers.
In the case of one famous chat bot everyone is using far too much, it will save a response a user liked to be regurgitated at a later time for another user, with some teachers knowing their students used AI on an assignment by the similarity of individual sentences and passages across different students' assignments.
The only thing left to do is figure out a way to secure creative product from being sucked into a training model, while also leaving it free for dissemination among the people it is intended for.