Yet another nerd’s take on ChatGPT/stable diffusion/etc.

The thoughts in this post had been swirling in my head for a couple of weeks, but sort of congealed today while I listened to this EconTalk episode.

  • I theorize there are multiple kinds of creativity.
    • Combinatorial creativity: combining existing concepts in a way that hasn’t been done before. (Relatively common.)
      • Example: Harry Potter fan fiction.
    • Original creativity: generating novel concepts. (Much rarer.)
      • Example: inventing the Harry Potter universe.
    • (In truth I think the reality is more complicated. The difference between “combinatorial” and “original” creativity seems like one of abstraction level, rather than kind. I.e., all new things come about from new configurations of atoms, but a creative person usually works at a higher level of abstraction than atoms.)
  • The creativity shown by generative models (ChatGPT, stable diffusion, Dall-E, etc.) falls almost completely in the “combinatorial creativity” bucket.
    • Modern deep neural networks are essentially interpolators. In many cases they literally interpolate their training sets.
    • Abstractly, concepts can be regarded as points in a high-dimensional space. A generative AI is trained on data that induce a point cloud in this space.
    • Those points from the dataset have a convex hull. Current generative models seem to do a great job of interpolating within that convex hull. This is, by itself, an impressive and valuable achievement (to say the least). A ton of economic and human value comes from fleshing out that convex hull, finding new combinations of ideas that make our lives better and more interesting.
    • What’s less clear is how well they can generate points outside of that convex hull. It’s rare even for humans to do that.

From this perspective, what can knowledge-workers or creatives do to maximize their comparative advantage against AI?

  • Pay attention to your environment. If you do encounter a novel concept, it will probably arise from some kind of interaction between you and your physical or social surroundings. This is your best chance at punching through that convex hull.
  • Embrace weirdness. You have something unique to contribute. Let the world see it!
  • Avoid being too predictable. De-correlate your thinking from that of other people. If I can predict your thoughts, words and actions from simple labels (“democrat”, “republican”, “religious”, “irreligious”, etc.) then you’re unlikely to provide any alpha to society.
  • Find ways to harness AI to enhance productivity.
  • There’s still room for a human touch. It helps to be a pleasant person to be around.

You may also invoke the muse:

O Divine Poesy,
Goddess-daughter of Zeus,
[…]
Make the tale live for us
In all its many bearings,
O Muse.

\( \blacksquare\)