Pianita number 17 is a short, haunting piece for the piano. Set in the D minor key, its poignant chords and softly ascending arpeggios convey a sense of lost love, yet with enough novelty — dissonant notes and an eerie timing shift — to lift the piece out of cliché. What searing life experiences, then, did the composer pour into this work?
None, as it turns out. Because this music was produced by an artificial-intelligence model, trained on thousands of hours of YouTube videos.
For decades, psychologists have thought of creativity as a key trait that would set us apart from machines, even as they surpassed us in intelligence and skill. But now, a wave of generative AI models, which create new content based on learning from huge data sets, is throwing shade on this idea.
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These models exploded onto the scene in November 2022 when the California AI firm OpenAI released ChatGPT, a hugely popular AI chatbot. Powered by the large language model (LLM) GPT-3.5, ChatGPT was able to produce convincing text and images in response to simple prompts. Models that were even more impressive quickly followed.
From poetry and video to ideas and music, AI-generated content now rivals many human-made works, meaning that the standard scientific definitions of creativity struggle to distinguish between people and computers. The progress since 2022 has been “absolutely mind-blowing”, says Simon Colton, who studies computational creativity at Queen Mary, University of London. “All of my colleagues are scrambling to catch up, like ‘What? What just happened?’”
So should we accept that AI is now creative? Or change the definition to safeguard human creativity? Researchers on both sides argue that the stakes are high — not just for AI’s creative potential, but for our own.
Machine ingenuity
The debate over whether machines can be creative isn’t new. In the 1840s, Ada Lovelace, who collaborated on a prototype of the first digital computer, the Analytical Engine, insisted that despite the model’s impressive abilities, “it has no pretensions whatever to originate anything” and is limited to “whatever we know how to order it to perform”. More than a century later, many scientists still held the same opinion, but in 1950, mathematician Alan Turing provocatively argued the reverse: that there was no human faculty that couldn’t one day be replicated by computers.
Some 50 years later, machines began to rival even the most talented humans at specific tasks. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue computer beat the reigning chess world champion. Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo program achieved a similar feat for the game of Go in 2015. In 2019, Google unveiled the Bach Doodle, which could harmonize short melodies in the style of the German composer Johann Sebastian Bach. But researchers agree that what’s happening now with generative AI is different from anything seen or heard before.
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