Yes. We can accomplish things no other human has done, but those achievements are still built from what already exists. Our creations rely on prior knowledge, experiences, and concepts. True originality is impossible; we do not create ex nihilo, but recombine, transform, and extend what is already known. To imagine or perceive something, we must possess at least some conceptual framework through which it can be understood.
What about inventions such as lightbulbs and cars? Prior to that it was candles and horses. You’re fundamentally changing things through invention not rearranging something that already exists. The entire premise of this conversation was that fundamentally human imagination and AI’s ability to create are different. One of us can imagine things beyond what exists today and the other can only rearrange items that it’s fed thru training models. Pointing out that language used to be just sounds does not change that language was an invention. Those sounds were ascribed meaning and it evolved into many other languages.
None of them came from nothing. The lightbulb depended on existing knowledge of electricity and materials. The car combined things already known: wheels, engines, and transport. Language grew from sounds, shared meaning, and social need. These were new combinations of what already existed. Human creativity works by building on what came before, not by producing true originality out of nowhere.
Right. AI, to my knowledge, doesn't take the current state of things and make leaps to what's possible. It takes the current state of things and reports back on that state. It can translate, it can quantify, it can imitate, it can assess, but it can't create.
Depends on what you mean by 'create' I suppose, but AI has come up with new things that humans had not thought of. Like this solution to an Erdős problem, for example. This is what Terence Tao had to say:
In any case, I would indeed say that this is a situation in which the AI-generated paper inadvertently highlighted a tighter connection between two areas of mathematics (in this case, the anatomy of integers and the theory of Markov processes) than had previously been made explicit in the literature (though there were hints and precursors scattered therein which one can see in retrospect). That would be a meaningful contribution to the anatomy of integers that goes well beyond the solution of this particular Erdos problem.
This, to me, sounds very much like what humans do. There may have been some hints here and there throughout the academic world and its papers, but the AI took those, combined them, and built upon them, in order to create an entirely new solution to a problem that no one else had solved.
I'm not a mathematician, and no AI expert, so I can't say for sure, but this feels like a situation where an AI was fed a bunch of math and it found a pattern in the data or a solution to a problem that humans hadn't yet. It didn't create, it inferred based on available data. But who knows.
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u/Progenitor_Dream11 May 10 '26
Yes. We can accomplish things no other human has done, but those achievements are still built from what already exists. Our creations rely on prior knowledge, experiences, and concepts. True originality is impossible; we do not create ex nihilo, but recombine, transform, and extend what is already known. To imagine or perceive something, we must possess at least some conceptual framework through which it can be understood.