The one type of “creativity” only humans can do

🎆 It’s Presidents’ Day in the U.S., a holiday with no universally agreed upon name. It’s officially “George Washington’s Birthday” though few call it that, and it does not fall on Washington’s actual birthday, which is this Friday.
Issue #269: the first-ever Medium story + who to forget
By Harris Sockel

Last September, we asked you: Can AI create art? Your responses were varied and wide-ranging: some of you said yes, with the caveat that an AI can only “create” art after intense collaboration with a human. Just as many of you said no, arguing instead that creativity is an experience, and only humans can experience things.

Since then, as new chatbots continue to imitate human creativity, I’ve been thinking a lot about that conversation… because I think it points toward a deeper (and even thornier) question. What is creativity? And: What type of creativity is uniquely human?

Medium writers through the ages have attempted to tackle the first question. A decade ago, cartoonist Jessica Hagy defined creativity as humanity’s coping mechanism and chief survival strategy. Creative director James Bareham believes creativity = making mistakes. And Erica Verrillo implies that creativity is essentially a product of the unconscious mind.

Yesterday, though, I was reading through Alex Kantrowitz’s interview with Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and found a more technical definition. Hassabis is a Nobel laureate who developed an AI model that predicts a protein’s structure based on its chemical composition (important for testing new drugs). His AI research lab, DeepMind, was acquired by Google a decade ago.

Any AI’s most important capability? Creativity, or generating an output based on inputs. Hassabis breaks this down into three categories:

• Basic: Interpolation, or spitting out the average of what you’ve seen. For example, Midjourney producing an image of a cat based on thousands of cats it’s “seen.”
• Intermediate: Extrapolation. Take what’s already been done and move it forward a step. For example, AlphaGo’s 37th move, which it came up with on its own after playing millions of games. (AlphaGo is a computer program Hassabis’ team trained to play the ancient board game Go.)
• Advanced (only humans can do this): Invention. Instead of extrapolating a new move, design the game itself. “Somehow the system’s got to come up with a game that’s as elegant and as beautiful and perfect as [the ancient board game] Go,” he explains — and it can’t do that yet.

Maybe AI will get there eventually, but for now this is where humans excel: envisioning systems that are beautiful, complex, yet somehow elegant and simply understood.

These three “levels” of creativity made me think about the whole “can AI be creative?” conversation in a new way. It also made me wonder… when am I interpolating, extrapolating, or inventing? What do you think?

💥 From the archive: the first-ever Medium story

In the summer of 2012, weeks before Medium’s founder, Ev Williams, explained what this platform even is, early product lead Jason Stirman published history’s first-ever Medium story. It’s a visceral account about the time he was held up at gunpoint and dove into a ditch, narrowly escaping death.

“I learned fear is a quick adhesive but can take a lifetime to remove,” he writes. From literally the very beginning, Medium was a place for personal storytelling.

💡 Practical wisdom

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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

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