Question "Creativity"

Is this creative?

In the case of the London event, the AI had been fed enough of Bach’s music that it was able to learn and then mimic the composer’s signature style, fooling the audience.

The AI researchers designing these tools aren’t doing it for the fun of tricking people. They’re trying to prove that they can take AI farther than we’d previously thought possible — that they can make machines creative, just like human beings.

I have a canister on my kitchen counter.  It's designed to hold things in a sealed environment (I don't know how else to describe it briefly.) I use it to hold coffee beans.  It's painted to be decorative, rather than plain white.  The decoration is Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte."  It bears Seurat's signature, as well as the signature of the artist who copied it for the mass produced canister.

Is it creative?

Writers, when they are learning to write, often copy the style of writers they admire.  I tried to write like Ray Bradbury, once; when I was reading everything he wrote, and scouring bookracks (before I discovered bookstores; Barnes and Noble was not even a gleam in someone's eye at the time) for his paperbacks.  I tried to write poetry, and not write it like Auden or Eliot.  Eliot, if memory serves, said that bad poets copy great poets, and great poets steal from great poets.  Something like that.  And what point does that theft become "creative"?  When it becomes "The Waste Land"?  If I drip paint on canvas a la Jackson Pollock, or paint great blocks of color on huge canvases a la Rothko, or just color over lithographs of familiar products, a la Warhol, am I creative?  If I'm a great art forger and can fool experts with my Rembrandts or Titians, am I creative?

I'm trying to figure out the difference between me studying the music of Bach until I can recreate it as a "new" piece, and a computer doing it (and is a computer a "machine"?  Is there no difference  between the computer I type this on, and the car that sits in my garage, waiting for me to start it and direct it?  The distinction may be a fine one, but I think it exists, and is important.)?  Is either of us "creative," or are we, at best, merely imitative?

If I imitate Eliot's poetry, am I a creator of poetry?  If I imitate Bradbury's short stories and style, am I a creator of stories?

Elephants, after all, can make paintings.  Are they creative, however?  I'm not asking because the answer is self-obvious, that creativity is reserved for humans because we have...well, souls, was the old distinction.  I'm asking because creativity is not so self-evident as being merely a recognition of patterns and their replication.  Humans can be very creative when it comes to patterns.  Koko, the gorilla who could supposedly use ASL, never really understood language at all.  Experts in ASL who didn't include Koko's handlers reported her gestures were meaningless, at best gibberish, and usually not even sign language at all.  Her handlers saw patterns no one else could see; they were actually very creative in finding something (Language!  in a non-human!) that wasn't there.  (That link in this paragraph indicates the painting elephants are little different from Clever Hans, the horse that could "count.")  Much the way our ancestors saw gods and heroes and stories from their culture, in the stars.  Making sense of patterns, or making patterns period, may well be the basis of creativity.

Or it may not be.  What, after all, is "creativity"?  Replication?  If all a computer program can do is discern patterns and extrapolate from them, is that an advance?  It is reported that facial recognition software reads African American male faces as "angry" more often than other faces, including white males.  Why?  Because it recognizes a pattern?  Or because of the way it is programmed?  Is the facial recognition software being creative?  Or does the old computer doctrine of GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out), still hold sway?  Rats can be taught the pattern of a maze.  Music students can be taught the structures of a Bach piece.  But if all those students could ever do in composition is write imitation Bach, would they be creative?

The Vox article that started this is an interview, which includes this nugget:

Absolutely! That’s one of the strands I wanted to pull out: People think art is something very mystical — that there’s something appearing out of nothing, the creative genius. I wanted to reveal that a lot of creative acts do have structure and pattern and algorithms and logic.

Especially with music. Many people think emotions are just being spilled out onto the page, but any composer will tell you, “I’m actually doing something very structured, and the emotion arises out of the controlled acts I’m using in creating a piece of music.”

I agree, art is more than "a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions," whether or not they are recollected in tranquility.  Yeats, toward the end of this life, was warned against writing poetry by his doctor, because he labored so much over every line and word.  The strain, the doctor feared, had become too great.  Pound had an epiphany on a station platform of the Metro, and dashed home to write a sestina (a very formal poem) about it.  Disgusted, he tore it up until he came up with this simple brushstroke in words:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

I honestly don't think if you fed all of Pound's poetry, save that one, into a computer, it would replicate it.

The sonnet is one of the most restrictive forms of poetry.  It is full of patterns:  it either has an octave and a sestet, or three quatrains and a couplet.  Which of those forms you choose will determine the outcome, without wandering in to Spenserian sonnets, that is (another form for another time).  From the Italian form you can get something as interesting as this:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Even though that violates the Italian form ever so slightly.  This does, too, turning it a bit toward the English form at the end:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

And then there's Shakespeare's preferred form, with quatrains and a couplet:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
     And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
     As any she belied with false compare.

But the sonnet can go this way, too:

Here war is simple like a monument:
A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan

For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.

But ideas can be true although men die,
And we can watch a thousand faces
Made active by one lie:

And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking. Dachau.

Or Frost, who takes it into the territory of Dante's terza rima:

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Five sonnets, all following patterns, but doing so with a skill and verve we can only describe accurately (!) as "creative."  You could reproduce a Shakespearean sonnet, perhaps, if the pattern recognizes the cleverness of Shakespeare's "turn" in the couplet.  But what of Auden's reduction in line length until the final four syllables of the verse?  Frost's use of terza rima?  Is it pattern alone that makes these poems work, that makes them works of art?

For that matter, what is art?  Why is my dribbling paint on a canvas not the same as Pollock's?  Because he did it first?  I'll grant that's the answer to Duchamp's "In Advance of the Broken Arm"  or "Bicycle Wheel," if you don't appreciate the wit of Duchamp.  But isn't Pollock's work art because of Pollock's creativity?  If not that, then what?

I'm not saying machines can't be creative; just that it's a poor definition of "creativity" to say mimicry of a famous composer is the same thing as the creativity of that composer.  Any student of music could learn the patterns of Bach's oeuvre; even learning to write that way as a lesson on composition, shouldn't be mistaken as a creative act.  Unless creativity is a mere imitative act; and then, how do we understand something truly creative?