Ask Lemmygrad

Editing to add: they are also incapable of ever producing anything truly novel. Generative applications of machine learning can remix and randomize training data in interesting ways, but it cannot do anything outside of that. Anyone claiming otherwise is selling you something or doesn’t understand how these things function. Not to mention it is one of the most brute-force forms of computation I’ve ever seen; I appreciate efficiency and elegance in computing and automation, and something like an LLM is the polar opposite. More efficient solutions almost always exist

I'm not sure this is an accurate way to put it. I think I generally get what you're going for, that their creativity is highly dependent on what they've seen in training. But saying it means they can't do anything novel I think exaggerates what humans are doing, by comparison. Humans don't reach into the ether and pull out something never seen before. They are deeply influenced by their inner and outer world from birth to death, and though they can combine things in a way that hasn't quite been done in the same way before, it is still deeply dependent on what they have seen before (not entirely unlike AI training).

Where humans differ is 1) They can surely get a lot more creativity out of a lot less and 2) They are constantly learning on the fly, which makes them much more flexible and adaptable than a hard-trained LLM can be.

So are humans better at creativity? Absolutely, it's not even close (especially when we collaborate on it effectively). But are humans creating wholly original works and gen AI isn't? No, I don't think so. Both humans and gen AI can create remixes of things they've seen that haven't been seen before in quite the same way. But humans have a much higher ceiling on what they can do with their capability. Gen AI is a lot more hard-capped to training data and takes a lot of resources to learn more (and it can forget things / give different results from learning more - it won't necessarily improve across the board).