If you like anthropomorphizing AI.

I was reading the chapter "Artificial Creativity" from The Beginning of Infinity, where David Deutsch makes the case for how an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) must imitate all attributes of what it means to be a human (consciousness, intelligence, self-awareness, qualia, etc). While he does not refute the possibility of AGI, he states having good explanations for these attributes in humans as precursors before simulating them in a universal computer. Far from having plausible explanations for most of these attributes today, humanity seems to have jumped the gun on implementing intelligence as pattern matching algorithms with the transformer architecture.

The early pursuit in AI started with inconsequential chatbots (e.g. Eliza) that were no better than mere keyword matching programs that failed both the Turing test and Deutsch's argument of what true intelligence is. For in those programs, the intelligence or creativity in the answers for the chatbot originated in the mind of the programmer, not the program itself. The program must be able to explain its own answers. Today's state-of-the-art chatbots like ChatGPT seem to be able to do that convincingly. But are they really creative? People have this misconception that creativity is just mixing a bunch of things up together. Steve Jobs famously quipped - Creativity is just connecting things. But that alone isn't enough — there’s a difference between inspiration and imitation. Inspiration is creating something new that does not exist. We take ideas from others, merge them with our own thinking, and solve the problem at hand. Whereas, imitation merely reproduces. Today's AI is no more than a sophisticated pattern matching algorithm. They combine inputs based on learned patterns during training and regurgitate the most probable output that might solve user's query. Sure, they can create outputs they have never seen before. The other day, I saw a cat eating a chicken sandwich on Sora. Obviously something like that cannot happen in reality (at least not in the way as depicted in the image). So, people might say that is creative. But, ask it to invent Quantum Gravity. Now, that needs much more than just clever wordplay.

More importantly, as rightly said by Deutsch, creativity is something that cannot be defined. Because, once you define it, you confine it into a system that can be implemented into a program and replicated infinitely (as they have tried to do with Artificial Neural Networks). And, once you confine it into a system, that system is incapable of creating anything outside it. If creativity had to follow strict rules, Einstein might have accepted the Newtonian view of gravity as a force, and never have reimagined it as the curvature of spacetime. Therefore, fundamentally, creativity is undefinable.

Another well-known technique in AI is Reinforcement Learning. According to Wikipedia: It is a technique that involves aligning an intelligent agent with human preferences with a reward mechanism. This is a technique used for fine-tuning reasoning models like O1-mini. Now, to the uninformed it might seem like the agent is learning by itself. But, it is important to realize that the agent is only capable of learning within the guardrails that are set by the programmer. A model that is learning to park a car with this technique, will not suddenly start learning Calculus. Real intelligence is boundless, it is not narrow. It works in all directions and is unpredictable. Our school biology text books depicted evolution to show how man evolved from apes.

So it is easy to convincingly arrive at a conclusion for that is how evolution works. It does not. Evolution does not have an end goal in mind. It did not have a goal of creating humans from the time a LUCA appeared on Earth. If humans were to disappear from earth today, it cannot be guaranteed that chimpanzees will mutate and fill that void on Earth. It is totally unpredictable.

While AI today is really good (almost magical), it is nowhere close to General Intelligence. In fact, it is progressing in the opposite direction. AND THAT IS HOW IT SHOULD BE — for the same reason why an airplane does not fly like a bird, or a car does not run like a cheetah. An AGI that disobeys humans won't be so sexy, will it? Thomas Edison once said — Progress consists of alternating phases of inspiration and perspiration. We need AI to automate the perspiration while humans still invent and innovate. If anything, progress is going to be much faster now as everyone is leveraged. So, stop anthropomorphizing it, and use it for what it is — a tool. It is not going to take your job. The future is only going to be great!

It is our duty to remain optimists. — Karl Popper