Summary
Back in March, we publishedthis piecebyRhea Purohitin response toSam Altman’s tweet about an unreleased OpenAI model that impressed him with its creative writing. Now thatGPT-5is out, it’s unclear whether that mysterious LLM was GPT-5 itself or something else that never saw the light of day. What endures, though, is the deeper question Altman’s tweet raised—whether AI can truly be creative. It’s a question the late cognitive scientistMargaret Bodenspent decades exploring, long before ChatGPT made the topic mainstream.Her passinglast month makes revisiting these ideas feel all the more timely.—Kate LeeWas this newsletter forwarded to you?Sign upto get it in your inbox.Sam Altmanrecentlytweetedthat OpenAI has trained a model that’s good at creative writing, asserting that it was the first time he’d been “really struck by something written by AI.” While the unnamed model isn’t publicly available yet, Altman gave us a glimpse of its potential by sharing a prompt—“please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief”—alongside the1,172-word narrativeit generated.Reactions to Altman’s tweet were mixed—some weredeeply movedby the AI’s story, while othersdismissed itas trash. But I think debating the literary merit of the piece misses the point. The model’s demo begs a deeper question: are large language models capable of writing creatively?When we judge whether AI can write creatively, we’re really expressing our own beliefs about what creativity is—not something many of us spend much time thinking about. We may think we know it when we see it, but putting “it” into words is surprisingly difficult. Is originality an illusion, a deft trick of taking in data about the world and parsing and rearranging it? Or is it rooted in some ineffable aspect of human experience? Or is it something else entirely: a subjective judgment that’s open to interpretation by whomever is interacting with the creative work?As I tried to get to the bottom of these questions, I found a bunch of fascinating ideas about how creativity might work in machines. One thing I didnotfind is a black or white answer to the question of whether LLMs are our next great literary talent. It turns out it depends a lot on how we, the humans in this story, look at things.Machines and theories of creativityMore than two decades before Altman’s tweet, cognitive scientistMargaret Bodenpublished apaperon creativity and artificial intelligence. Boden theorized that creativity came in three broad types:Become apaid subscriber to Everyto unlock this piece and learn about:How we define and measure creativity in machinesOne way that AI's creative capacity hasn't changed despite explosive progressWhy humans are a critical part of defining creativityUpgrade to paidClick hereto read the full postWant the full text of all articles in RSS?Become a subscriber, orlearn more.Book information
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Business and Economics
