The amount of work done that is truly new is laughably small. A large percentage of creative output is convergent (combining two existing things) or lateral (bringing an idea from one space to another).

Whereas this comment, seen fifteen thousand plus times on this very website, is evidence of ... your human creativity?

It's a tiresome argument that "An AI can't possibly create anything" To strawman it there's a kind of fetishization of creativity (are your turds creative? is everything you do special?) and there is also Roger Penrose's bogus argument that he can do math because he's a thetan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind

The most articulate version is something you hear from religious types which is "you have the power to create because God created you" but if God can delegate its creative power to you why can't you delegate your creative power to something you created?

"Uniqueness" is not real creativity, I mean, the Python script

   from uuid import uuid4
   print(uuid4())

creates something the world has never seen before and will never see again and would be completely indifferent to except for the fact of its uniqueness. Practically creativity has some element of being useful or expressive within the bounds of some constraints. If I was hiring you to be a writer or I commissioned an artwork I'd have some specification of what I want. Can an AI of some kind do that? Sure.

From the viewpoint of being compelling, some people are easy to satisfy. An AI might be able to satisfy them better you can because what that person needs might be squicky to you or at best tiresome and your "self" will get in the way of seduction, yet the AI can always respond the way it wants you to respond. I'm highly satisfied with the selections that are made by my YOShInOn smart RSS reader even though these are just selections and not "creations", however I'd imagine a system which you work with over a long time and that learns you preferences could "create" things that satisfy you much better than what you can find on the internet.

That's true but we have to ask do humans actually create engaging, new ideas? When you look at all the stories that have been created aren't they just slight variations on the same themes that have been around for, as near as we can tell, all time? When we look back at our historical writings it's the same themes at their core over and over it's just a different way to tell the story. Considering that we can look back 10,000 years in history and see the same common themes being retold it is quite likely that prior to that we were still telling the same stories.

We can find different ways to tell them which can be entertaining and it can feel new but when you examine it it's not really new.

> That's true but we have to ask do humans actually create engaging, new ideas

This is a red herring, and entirely irrelevant

The question of whether or not humans or AI "do" create new ideas is not relevant

The question is whether or not humans or AI can create new ideas

Humans quite obviously can, because humans did. Even if you see the same common themes for 10000 years, at some point those themes were created by humans. We must be capable of creating new ideas, even if we don't actually do it very much.

AI may not even be capable of creating new ideas. It probably isn't in its current state, and may not ever be

The red herring argument you're making here is your own. You were saying because ideas are here therefore humans must have been capable of creating them. There is no evidence of that other than saying because it's here therefore it had to come from a source of your own presupposing.

If you do not know where the original ideas came from or how they originated it is impossible to determine if AI is capable of doing the same thing. Even accepting the premise that humans did originate these ideas, there zero evidence that they did it spontaneously with no inputs. So with that premise in hand if AI is provided the same inputs it is likely they would produce the same outputs. Considering whatever those inputs where is completely unknown and unknowable at this point All of it is conjecture except for the fact that humans are effectively not creating net new ideas therefore there should be no expectation that AI is able to do that either.

> If you do not know where the original ideas came from or how they originated

What are you talking about

We do know where ideas came from! They came from humans! We sent humans to the moon using ideas about rocketry that a human invented, we know that because some of those people were alive when we were alive!

Look at the current AI LLM boom? The people responsible for that technology is alive today, you can talk to them!

Have you been reading the prior comments or did you just come to spout something off about space travel that was totally irrelevant?

How are you suggesting these ideas are here if humans didn't create them?

I don't need to make a suggestion on how something came to be, It would be up to the person who says it happened in a certain way to provide the evidence to support that. It is not evidence in any meaningful way to say because it's here now therefore it must have been done by humans. It likely was but that doesn't mean it was entirely done by humans absent any external input.

Claiming that these ideas were the sole creation of humans with zero external input seems to be the same argument that intelligent design people make when they look at the complexity of biological systems. Are you a proponent of intelligent design? Because they draw the same conclusions that something of such complexity must have had an initial creator.

If you bother to read up a few comments you will see the entire point of this thread is that there is a base assumption that AI cannot create anything absent the supplied input that they've been given. So refocus on that and my response that humans have not been shown to create anything absent the supplied input that they have been given. To make an assumption that humans created something absent inputs would require an extraordinary amount of proof demonstrating that that's possible.

I have no idea how you would demonstrate that's possible because humans continually receive input from their surroundings all of the time.

The problem of originality has been of intense debate since at least the romantic era.

There are people who have argued that human creativity is nothing more than outputs based on existing data (experience).