Can AI be creative?

And are humans really creative?

What is creativity? there are a lot of ways to describe what it is, here is one that I like :
“Creativity is the execution of an idea which has both originality and value.”

Now I really like this definition because it covers everything I think of as creativity, creating some sort of value, originality is one of the most important aspects of it, but funnily enough, it is the one that is the most unclear amongst the three.

Now, originality is quite ambiguous, because certain additions to a particular thing may completely change it, but the latter wouldn’t exist without the former, you can never establish whether an idea is completely novel. This is where it gets tricky, if we can’t establish when an idea is original, everything gets to be original.

Secondly, most humans are not creative, in that most ideas are subconsciously derivative, since when we go through the motions at school, we’re introduced to various sorts of ideas, and many of the ideas that we end up formulating later, might be derivative in some sense to the ones fed to us in our education, now this might not be true always, but it is mostly true, because we see that most great authors are very good readers as well, basically, we’re feeding our brain information to think in a certain way, thus in some sense, most of our ideas can be classified as derivative in a way.

Another place where the distinctions get blurry is classifying work as being inspired from and being derivative, now this is a line which is very important to our current discussion, since, essentially what AI does is take inspiration from human ideas, in the weirdly mathematical way that it can and applies it very effectively. Thus it becomes even more important to make this distinction clear.

A major argument here is that, should art that can be classified as being inspired from other works or derivative in a sense, be thought of as creative?
since, if it should, AI could be said to have creative power. If not, most the art we have read or consumed, all goes back to a few pieces of original work and the rest are just derivatives.

Let’s do an experiment, i will show you two images here, and one is by a renowned artist and the other is by an AI, you’ve gotta guess which one is which and then scroll down to find out :

Now, if you’ve guessed the left one to be the human one, you’re right, the image on the right is a painting by a renowned Latvian painter called Zanis Waldheims, and the one on the right is created by an AI called Ai-Da named after Ada Lovelace.

Now a few of you (let’s be real, a lot of you) got this wrong, and had I not known about this in advance, I would have been pretty confused too, but to the untrained eye, it is really difficult to figure out which one is which. If you were presented these two at an art exhibition without being informed about the background of it, you would just rule it out as one of those “abstract paintings” and move on, but I’m pretty sure, it might have tricked a few really well informed art followers as well.

In conclusion, art was imagined to be one of those things that expressed deep human emotions, and art is still considered to be inherently very human, but AI, as it has always done, has now challenged the validity of our existing beliefs, we could dive deeper, and it essentially boils down to this, What makes us human? What is it that we can’t replicate that makes us, us?