William Deresiewicz, scrittore, saggista e critico letterario statunitense, riflette su Persuasion sui meccanismi predittivi e come questi siano in contrasto con la vera produzione artistica, che invece richiede originalità. Gli artisti fanno scelte a bassa probabilità, scelte originali, che sembrano errori e che a volte sono realmente errori. 

AI operates by making high-probability choices: the most likely next word, in the case of written texts. Artists—painters and sculptors, novelists and poets, filmmakers, composers, choreographers—do the opposite. They make low-probability choices. They make choices that are unexpected, strange, that look like mistakes. Sometimes they are mistakes, recognized, in retrospect, as happy accidents. That is what originality is, by definition: a low-probability choice, a choice that has never been made.

Le scelte a bassa probabilità vengono dall’ispirazione.

Inspiration is mysterious (not the same as mystical, though some would say it’s that, as well). Its nature is obscure. It is neither conscious nor unconscious but instead involves a delicate and frequently elusive interplay between the two. It is serendipitous—like standing in a thunderstorm,said Randall Jarrell, and hoping to be struck by lightning. That is why successful works cannot be replicated even by the artists who create them. Every new one is a voyage of discovery, its destination unforeseeable—the very opposite of creating, as the AIs do, to a set of specifications. “The main thing in beginning a novel,”wrote Virginia Woolf, “is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can’t cross: that it’s to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish.” Quality in art is an emergent property: it arises in the doing, in a dialogic dance between the artist and the work. As the work takes shape, it shows the artist what it wants to be.

Intelligenza e la creatività sono cose diverse e gli esseri umani, quando sono artisti, riescono a creare nuovi contenuti senza limitarsi a ricombinare elementi già esistenti.

We argue whether artificial intelligence is truly intelligent, but even if it is, intelligence and creativity are very different things. Part of the confusion in discussions of AI and art undoubtedly arises from the degraded conception of creativity that has taken hold, in recent years, in tech. Nothing is original, techno-pundits like to say; “everything is a remix.” This is a banality that grew up to become a stupidity. That new creations build upon existing ones has long been a cliché, but the techies have stretched it to mean that nothing is ever original: that creativity involves, and only involves, the rearrangement of existing parts. Which makes you wonder how we ever managed to progress from the first painting in the first cave. Assisting these arguments is the concept of the meme, the idea that elements of culture propagate themselves from mind to mind, just as genes do from body to body. But the meme hypothesis (and it is only a hypothesis) fails to recognize that minds are capable of altering their contents. We don’t just passively transmit ideas and images, nor do we simply recombine them. Somehow, we manage to generate new ones: manage to create—through processes we do not understand and, I do not think, will ever replicate outside the human brain—the elements of culture to begin with. Or, at least, some of us do.