You're baking a lot of philosophy into "creativity requires intent." We can't even prove qualia are universal, which is a prerequisite for "intent" beyond "neurons firing" (what about hypothetical aliens without neurons, could they have "intent"?) and if you skip that, humans don't even understand themselves, this has been well studied, so any "intent" is a post hoc justification in more cases than not.
The nature of creativity is an implicitly philosophical matter, and you can't criticize me for that when you're putting qualia on the table.
Semantic arguments aren't interesting. Do you believe that creativity doesn't require intent, that intent doesn't exist in any meaningful sense, or that intent is only relevant if LLMs possess it? It's difficult for me to parse an actual rebuttal from your comment.
So "intent doesn't exist in any meaningful sense?"
You're requiring me to first solve the hard problem of consciousness before making an argument you consider credible but I have yet to see a counterargument on your part which meets the same criteria, and you would need to do so to prove my statement is a "house of cards" versus simply an opinion with which you disagree.
I think yours is the more difficult argument. I can't really grasp a definition of art that doesn't presuppose intent.
Imagine any Ansel Adams picture was taken by a monkey. Are they suddenly trash? Imagine your favorite haiku was instead created by a parrot mashing together overheard snippets from its owner. Again trash? The argument gets frighteningly literal when you consider people like Jackson Pollock.
Ansel Adams had a process that incorporated on his understanding of optics, film, light and aesthetics. He didn't just point a camera in an arbitrary direction and push a button. I don't think a monkey could take an "Ansel Adams picture." If one took a picture that resembled an Ansel Adams picture... somehow... it would be a novelty but I wouldn't consider it art. No one would say "this monkey is equivalent to Ansel Adams in every meaningful sense" or that "Ansel Adams clearly doesn't have intent behind his photos because a monkey made this" or that "this monkey's intent is the same as Ansel Adams because it took a photo that resembles the artist's work."
And a parrot repeating words isn't creating art either, even if it repeats a haiku, any more than a Xerox machine copying a book is writing a novel. No one considers a parrot a poet. The person who wrote the haiku clearly intended to say something. Random words strung together which just happen to meet the syllable requirements aren't a haiku.
And believe it or not there was intent and even technique in Jackson Pollock's work. All of the modern and "postmodern" art that Hacker News likes to deride had something to say, and it expressed something unique about the artist and their cultural context and sometimes their relationship to the art movement itself. The "banana taped to a wall" was an intentional criticism of consumer culture. There was intent behind Duchamp's urinal (it was testing the boundaries of what the art community considered legitimate.) That intent is there even if you don't respect it because the work appears superficially simple. None of it was purely random or purely mechanistic.
If you told an AI to generate something in the style of Studio Ghibli it would copy the superficial elements of the technique but it would never spontaneously create Princess Mononoke because it doesn't have (nor can it comprehend) Hayao Miyazaki's views on environmentalism and industrialism, nor his experiences living in post WW2 Japan. What makes Ghibli movies art is not simply the aesthetic but the human element.
