Beyond the Buzz: Can AI Truly Be Creative?

Many fear AI without understanding, it’s just Machine Learning

adevarias
3 min readOct 7, 2024
AI Generated with Midjourney, author provided

The tech world is abuzz with news of Elon Musk’s latest AI supercluster, a behemoth powered by 50,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. This, coupled with the unveiling of Tesla’s Optimus robot and OpenAI’s eerily human-like voice model, has reignited the debate about the potential of artificial intelligence. While these advancements are undeniably impressive, they also beg the question: can AI truly be creative?

Musk’s pursuit of “real AI” speaks to a broader ambition within the field — to create artificial intelligence that not only mimics human intelligence but surpasses it. However, a conversation with my coworker helped me clarify and highlight the limitations of current AI models. While they excel at generating text, images, and even code, they still rely heavily on machine learning and existing data.

“They’re bouncing off of human knowledge,” I remarked. “They can create infinite variations, but they can’t conjure up something truly new.”

This observation cuts to the heart of the creativity debate. True creativity, it seems, involves more than just rearranging existing information or identifying patterns. It requires originality, intentionality, emotional investment, and the ability to connect…

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adevarias

Architectural designer monthly crafting well-researched articles envisioning the future (and sometimes the past) of the built environment.