AI-generated media is reshaping our understanding of creativity, originality, and authorship. Rather than the traditional process of creation through craft, AI-generated works can be viewed as a form of creation through discovery. The AI-generating creator becomes an explorer, navigating a vast landscape of possibilities, uncovering and collecting creative material hidden within immense datasets, much like a prospector searching for raw gems to later craft into exquisite jewelry.
This idea is akin to how mathematicians perceive their work: they don’t invent mathematical truths; they discover them. These truths exist independently, waiting to be found, like an undiscovered prime number or a clever pun already nestled within layers of language. The discoveries may later be woven into the mathematician’s original theory, or in the case of a pun, a comedian's routine.
This concept reminds me of one of my favorite Borges' short stories, The Library of Babel 1, a theoretical library containing every possible combination of letters and, consequently, every conceivable written work. The library is so immense that finding a specific book becomes virtually impossible. Borges was illustrating the mind-boggling vastness of mathematical possibilities that exist beyond humanity's grasp.
Today, overwhelming amounts of data, like Borges’ library, may no longer lie beyond humanity’s reach. Artificial intelligence enables us to traverse these vast datasets, discovering, filtering, and curating to reveal hidden gems.
This is where human input becomes essential. While interacting with AI models, human creativity and originality emerge implicitly through a recursive process of discovery, analysis, and refinement. The artist guides the AI, crafting prompts and curating outputs that ultimately shape the final piece.
This perspective raises questions about originality and authorship in an AI-generated media world. If AI is searching rather than creating in the traditional sense, how do we describe the human's role as creator? In this case, the creator’s adeptness in querying and filtering methods, combined with intuition for aesthetic curation, drives the creative decisions pivotal in uncovering meaningful AI-generated output from the vast range of possibilities.
Or is creativity found in designing and training the AI models themselves, emphasizing the ingenuity required to develop systems capable of such original output.
AI-generated media represents a shift in how we define creativity and perceive creative works. It requires a profound collaboration, and perhaps tension, between machine computation and human intention. By framing it as a process of discovery, we embrace the vast possibilities technology offers, while recognizing the human role as explorers, navigating this new terrain with new tools and creative methodologies.
I believe we may find that the journey of creative discovery is just as enriching, and as much a sign of creativity, authenticity, and originality, as the creations themselves.
