Artificial intelligence sheds light on human creativity. I recently used some AI websites to generate song lyrics and poetry. These programs are amazing at spewing forth rhymes.
They respond to topical prompts and quickly compose verses in a variety of styles. I requested a song about freedom in the style of Bob Marley, a Borderlands lyric after Willie Nelson, and a John Denver tune about mothers. I asked for poems about mourning, God, and redwood trees.
I prompted AI to write a sonnet about education, a limerick about food, and a haiku about bear – among other things. These programs were amazingly fast at generating rhythm and rhyme. Some of the words were quite moving.
For a moment it was fun. But it was uncanny to read poems about death and divinity from a computer that experiences neither. A song without a singer is a strange and sterile thing.
In comparison with AI, human artists are slow and feeble. AI can quickly and efficiently churn out adequate products. At one point in my experiment, I typed limerick prompts into the AI as fast as I could.
AI kept generating decent rhymes. No human could do that. As we experiment with AI, we may second-guess our creativity.
AI can make humans feel inferior. If a computer can write a sonnet in a few seconds, what value is there in the human creative process? Humans are less efficient processors of information. However artificial intelligence lacks the soulful agency of human intelligence.
The point of human creativity is not to ge.
