Can AI be creative?
“Even I didn’t see it coming”: Horror king Stephen King explains why AI can’t (yet) replace him
He is familiar with scary stories – but Stephen King does not yet want to believe in the horror of AI
His works have been used to train artificial intelligence. In a recent essay, the king of horror Stephen King explains why it hasn’t reached human authors yet – and when that will change.
In his series “The Dark Tower” a train that has developed consciousness tries to kill the main characters. author However, Stephen King is not afraid of the current forms of artificial intelligence. And although he thinks that could change soon, he doesn’t want to stand in her way.
King explains this in a recent essay in The Atlantic magazine. “My books were used to train AI,” the title of the piece already makes clear the starting point of his thoughts. Almost two weeks ago it became known that language AIs like ChatGPT were also being fed with illegally loaded books. King doesn’t mind that much though. For him, the main question is: Can AI replace a human author?
Greater than the sum of its parts
“So far the answer is no,” he is certain. In his opinion, this depends primarily on one factor. The current programs are able to devour and process vast amounts of literature – for King, one of the most important prerequisites is to write well as a human author. But the ability to “create something that goes beyond the sum of these parts” is still missing.
As an example, he cites a scene from an as yet unpublished book. In the scene, one character shoots another from behind. Instead of penetrating the head, the bullet lodges in the skull, causing a sort of bulge protruding from the forehead. “As I sat down that day, I knew the murder was going to happen, that it would be done with a gun,” he says. “I was unaware of this bulge, the sight of which will haunt the shooter throughout history.”
It was a real creative moment, he insists. “One that grew out of the story and the observation of this murder. It was a complete surprise,” he enthuses of the human capacity for original thought. “Could a machine make something like that up? I don’t think so. Still not” (emphasis in original).
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No real intelligence (yet).
As you can already read, he does not consider this kind of creativity through machines to be fundamentally impossible. In King’s view, creativity presupposes awareness. “And there are arguments that some AIs have one. Then creativity would also be possible now or in the future.”
In fact, writing programs like ChatGPT have not yet been able to develop their own ideas. This is also due to the way they work: Based on billions and billions of pages of text, they basically just guess which word is the most likely next. This often results in surprisingly good texts, but the computer has not really been able to understand them so far.
Schauer-König admits that he regards the idea of an AI that actually writes creatively with “scary fascination”. Nevertheless, even then he would not prevent his works from contributing to this, if that were at all possible. “Then I could forbid the tide just like King Canute or try to destroy a steam engine as a Luddite”; he surrenders to the course of progress. The 75-year-old King jokes that he himself probably no longer has a problem with it, perhaps because of his “quite advanced age” he was relaxed about the question.
Source:TheAtlantic