A couple days ago I saw a tweet that described how to remove an element from an array in O(1) time instead of O(n). The key to it was identifying that for the purpose the given array was being used for, it could be unordered / not fully ordered, and it would not be an issue.
This way, it was possible to simply replace the element with the last array element, then decrease the size of the array by one. I'd say that's pretty creative: whoever came up with this was able identify what can be traded off to make the previously impossible, possible, unlocking new scales and possibilities.
In practice, I'd say creativity is often being able to manifest people's qualia in some unprecedented way. For example, say you're experimenting in your DAW, and discover a pretty cool sound. You identify the ways it can be used to emote and then utilize it in a work. If you really stumbled upon a sound that a lot of people find as emotive as you did, you just did something creative: it's as if you translated the qualia of an emotion into sound.
This qualia to manifestation is what's behind creativity in all of senses of the word I believe. In my previous example, discovering that orderedness is not actually a strict requirement, and (ab)using that to significantly alter the scaling of such an action is creative, because it undoes the notion that orderedness is a requirement. It goes against what's natural, but in a way that becomes extremely natural and indispensable once realized.
I think, in that way, current AIs are trained to be uncreative, since being creative inherently requires experimentation that is unaligned with the normal.
Thank you for your answer! TIL a new word: qualia
I like your two examples. They have different perspectives. Though I must say the "qualia to manifestation" is still a bit abstract for me now. I'll keep them in mind.
> whoever came up with this was able identify what can be traded off to make the previously impossible, possible, unlocking new scales and possibilities.
In fairness, that is an extremely standard trick so it's reasonably unlikely that the author came up with it themselves.
Yeah I agree. Though it is hard to tell if LLMs are capable of "easy" creativity like that though because anything that easy has already been done many times in its training set.
You've have to invent some new domain I guess and see if it could be creative within that domain. Difficult to think of a good test though.
> HN, and the internet in general, have become just an ocean of reactionary sandbagging and blather about how "useless" LLMs are.
Now imagine how profoundly depressing it is to visit a HN post like this one, and be immediately met with blatant tribalism like this at the very top.
Do you genuinely think that going on a performative tirade like this is what's going to spark a more nuanced conversation? Or would you rather just the common sentiment be the same as yours? How many rounds of intellectual dishonesty do we need to figure this out?
Thing is, I'm used to hearing a very similar sentiment on how e.g. using vim keybindings is so literally going to make me a 10x 100x whatever rockstar developer - and it's like what, enabling me to edit text a bit faster? And it's always anecdotes that yeah, from-qualia you feel so fast. But from-qualia I run like a marathon runner and sound like a radio host.
I personally did find some use cases for it and it does a decent job of cutting out minor gruntwork for me. But the experience itself screams to me that whatever gains I'm feeling I'm getting are all in my head.
> using vim keybindings is so literally going to make me a 10x 100x whatever rockstar developer - and it's like what, enabling me to edit text a bit faster?
Yes, to me LLM is exactly like this: from nano to vim.
I don't think basic vim usage (which is all I know, really) makes anyone super efficient. I don't think typing/editing speed is generally an important factor in programmer productivity or 'coding speed'.
It's just that every time I use nano it's (a) unintentional, as it's opened via EDITOR; (b) sort-of coerced, because most distros installing it by default also think it's somehow too much to install Vim or Emacs alongside it; and (c) extremely painfully awkward, because all other editors I use, I've invested at least as couple years of practice into.
If I spent a year using nano every day, and if I evolved a config file and read the manual during that time, I might eventually reach a place where using nano didn't feel cumbersome and irritating, but why would I do that if I already use Emacs and Vim every day? If I learn a 'new' editor it's going to be something extensible that I could see myself programming in every day: Emacs without evil; or one of the newer modal editors with a reversed sentence order, like kakoune and Helix; or, hell, VSCode.
So nano is likely doomed to remain forever cumbersome and irritating for me, somewhere on the level of typing on a touchscreen instead of a real keyboard.
Do non-managers / not-business-owners have a better way of using these technologies? Or who exactly are you envisioning as possessing that supposed pinnacle of human creativity?
"non-managers / not-business-owners" usually do have a better way of using these technologies, unless the former have actually worked in the field or in the frontlines and then advanced to managers.
It might sound condescending, but a lot, and I mean a loooooot of product managers, product heads, product owners, VP's, CEO's and such don't have a clue what they're doing or experience in the real world. One might be "oh but why are they CEO then", but hell, corporate incompetence is a real thing.
I've met dozens, if not hundreds of PMs/POs who were hired based on "oh they have organisational skills and aren't an autist when it comes to talking".
>"Or who exactly are you envisioning as possessing that supposed pinnacle of human creativity"
Creative people.
It's okay to say some people aren't creative. Most ticket-dragging meeting-slacking Jira people aren't it.
I've met devs who had brilliant ideas on AI incorporation, only to be dismissed by the higher ups because they didn't understand it. I've talked to designers who's ideas could save hundreds of man-hours if implemented.
But do you really think an average VP knows that they can use their existing component library to train an MMM to output pseudo-code from screenshot and then translate that into their real, existing components? Or that an LLM could be hooked up to auto-correct the mistakes in the input of tens of thousands workers that they actually have people check, wasting human souls on what is basically input formatting? Or shit, that it could even translate John from Warehouse's data directly into monthly reports without him having to go around asking stuff and wasting everyone's time?
No, these people usually don't have a clue about the real-world process of actual work that goes on so, so of course they have a problem identifying leverage spots in it.
It's not really that I think C-suites all over the world are savants in current technologies. I will say that I might be coming at it from a biased perspective though where most my higher ups are exactly the kind where they do have actual work experience in tech.
Rather, it's just that after multiple hackathons and several greenlit internal projects, there isn't a single one I wouldn't find an utter dogshit waste of money, time and effort. So while maybe we're just an unfortunate bunch who somehow all belong to that non-creative group, I struggle to imagine an actually good application of these technologies that are somehow all just being dismissed prematurely by those evil bean counters up there.
It's just software like any other. It's vulnerable and it has defects. So it's very reasonable to at least check if there's an update available.
> People are blind to the fact that updates can and do introduce new bugs.
I do agree that this fact is often underappreciated - the single biggest cause of breakages are usually the rollout of changes themselves. But again, it's just like with any other software.
Explains why most everyone is amazed then, doesn't it?
Like how many people do you reckon work with "a truly competent chemist" in their life? A knee-jerk Google search quoted me approx. 100 000 people working as a chemist in the States, compared to approx. 135 040 000 people working a full time job in general. That's 0.07% of the workforce being chemists. Of which who knows how many fit your bill of being a "truly great chemist", and then who knows how many people get a chance to work with them. The number of people who should be able to tell how good of a chemist he is is orders of magnitude lower than the views on any one of his videos.
This way, it was possible to simply replace the element with the last array element, then decrease the size of the array by one. I'd say that's pretty creative: whoever came up with this was able identify what can be traded off to make the previously impossible, possible, unlocking new scales and possibilities.
In practice, I'd say creativity is often being able to manifest people's qualia in some unprecedented way. For example, say you're experimenting in your DAW, and discover a pretty cool sound. You identify the ways it can be used to emote and then utilize it in a work. If you really stumbled upon a sound that a lot of people find as emotive as you did, you just did something creative: it's as if you translated the qualia of an emotion into sound.
This qualia to manifestation is what's behind creativity in all of senses of the word I believe. In my previous example, discovering that orderedness is not actually a strict requirement, and (ab)using that to significantly alter the scaling of such an action is creative, because it undoes the notion that orderedness is a requirement. It goes against what's natural, but in a way that becomes extremely natural and indispensable once realized.
I think, in that way, current AIs are trained to be uncreative, since being creative inherently requires experimentation that is unaligned with the normal.
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