Artificial Intelligence by Cinda in Minneapolis

The creation of artificial intelligence (AI) demonstrates human creativity applied to computer science. Aspects of artificial intelligence amaze, such as the generative AI based on large language models like ChatGPT. However, it has limitations. (Yes, I really did write that AI has limitations.)

Recently, for example, I listened to a college scholarship administrator ranting about the essays that accompanied this year’s batch of scholarship applications. Her complaint focused on how many students had used AI to write their essays for them. It was easy, according to the administrator, to identify the essays by AI. The sophisticated English vocabulary gave it away. A large percentage of applicants are not fluent in English and their written English vocabulary is not sophisticated or broad. The students believed that using AI would help them win a scholarship when it had the opposite effect. Going forward, the administrator will specify in the essay instructions that AI essays will not be accepted. Essays must be written by the student in their own words, imperfect English and all.

Can AI be creative and original? Or is being imaginative and creating original works—in computer science or literature or music or whatever—only a human activity?

My first thought involved Star Trek: The Next Generation and a beloved character named Data, an android. His creator, Dr. Soong, made Data in his own image—he’s male with a similar physical appearance. Data strives to be human which is a futile quest despite his organic body parts. He has a positronic brain, not an organic one. Data is Artificial Intelligence in a body that appears human. Is he sentient? The series devoted an episode to that question: “The Measure of a Man” (Season 2, episode 9).

In addition to his normal duties on the USS Enterprise, Data pursues music and painting and acting. His pursuits, however, are exercises in either combining all the possible ways to perform on a violin from his programming, or different styles of painting and acting. Acting would be the supreme challenge for him because it involves understanding human beings, and it’s impossible to combine all the possible personalities and behaviors of humans into a computer program. Data still uses acting to help him understand humans, their motivations, desires, fears, etc. But is Data creative? He tries. But nothing he does in the arts is unique to him, unless his ability to combine or choose different ways of performing the violin could be considered unique to him, like his logic and algorithms and his positronic brain. But is it creative?

Let’s back up. What is Data? He’s a character dreamed up by the writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation or Gene Roddenberry or both. He came from human imagination, and the way he develops over the course of the series came from human imagination. I would guess that as the series progressed, the actors, especially Brent Spiner who played Data, added their ideas about Data’s character development along with the writers, directors, and producers. Their imaginations worked independently as well as collaboratively. Does Data have imagination, the source of human creativity? Is it possible to program imagination?

In one episode, “Phantasms” (Season 7, episode 6), the dream program Dr. Soong had inserted into Data produces a recurring nightmare of a ringing phone, three manual laborers hammering, and members of the crew as different kinds of food especially cake. Rather than letting him turn the program off, Counselor Deanna Troi encourages Data to try therapy to understand the nightmare images. Sigmund Freud (of course, Data would choose him as his therapist) encourages Data to interact with the dream images to find out about them. It turns out that the images are representations of a reality that Data has perceived without being aware of it. But where did the specific images come from? For humans, the subconscious uses dreams as a way of processing the emotional experiences of each day or mental stressors or information. Could the subconscious be considered a “program” in the same sense as Data’s dream program? Why had the program used the information Data had perceived to create the nightmare? Was it programmed to do that? Does Data have a program that mimics imagination or is it real imagination?

Data has many programs. One such involves defending and protecting the humans that he serves, as well as the space ship he’s on. This program was interacting with Data’s dream program to draw his attention to a threat to the humans and the ship in the form of a recurring nightmare. Gradually, Data works through the nightmare and solves the mystery, revealing the threat. In this episode, Data comes the closest to exhibiting “imagination” as we humans know it. The writers perhaps wanted to believe that certain algorithms might be able to produce imagination in AI. But for Data, an AI, it’s still programming by a human scientist.

I don’t want a future in which machines rule the world. Today’s AI requires humans to use it, to prompt it in some way to produce what the human wants whether an action or a scholarship application essay. The AI cannot imagine the action or essay on its own. In fact, I would argue that the AI programming and massive database produces whatever a human has requested, not imagination as we understand it.

The imaginations that dreamed up the character of Data for Star Trek: The Next Generation are not the same as Data’s programming, his positronic brain or his algorithms. Creativity requires imagination. Give 10 writers a writing prompt for a story and you’ll get 10 different stories. Give AI the same writing prompt ten times, without any other direction, and I believe you’d get the same story, over and over again without the creativity and originality a human gives it. Will AI ever become creative? I doubt it. We humans are richer in our lives for our creativity and all the ideas from our imaginations.