[Nick Zwar]

Yes. And I agree that A.I. is not in the “truest” sense creative. Creativity suggests “original ideas” and “imagination”. A.I. has neither, A.I. has no original “ideas”, A.I. has no imagination. Which is why, unlike some, I am not worried that A.I. is anywhere near replacing creative artistry. A.I. simply cannot do that, and is far from it. A.I. can do the pedestrian stuff. Need an image of a bunny on a beach for a presentation? Prompt A.I. and get it done. Not great art, but it gets the pedestrian part out of the way. What A.I. lacks in ideas and imagination it compensates for with tremendous data absorption and recognition of patterns. It “knows” what a bunny is and it knows what a beach is, so it can put the two together, and voila. It won’t be great art, but often you don’t need great art but just an image to illustrate a point.

By the way, I am no more an “A.I.” fan than I am a fan of word processors or electric juicers or carports. “A.I.” is simply a tool which, and like any great tool, it enables shortcuts. There used to be a time when people had to copy books by hand, then came book printing, then came typewriters, now we had excellent wordprocessors and print on demand. That’s what good tools do: provide shortcuts.

I regularly use A.I. indeed to help with tasks that are boring and cumbersome, in a way that enables me to use shortcuts I could previously not do. I get a long contract with 60 pages of project description? I feed it into an A.I. agent and ask it to answer the five questions I have that are relevant for me about it and reference the sections. Bang, time saver. I need an outline for a presentation? I feed it into the A.I., tell it the points I want, and bang, I have an outline. Not one I will take 1:1, but one that I can use as a starting point, which is still an enormous time saver. So A.I. saves a lot of time for a lot of things.

But while A.I. opens up quite a fascinating new landscape, A.I. has, as I said, zero imagination and not an ounce of truely creative skills. In some ways it is not really “artificial intelligence” so much as it is “simulated intelligence”. A.I. seems intelligent because it can calculate well.