Human creativity, at it’s core, is not original. We smush things together, package it as something new, and in our hubris call it “original” because we are human, and thus infallible originators. Our minds are just electrical impulses that fire off in response to stimuli. There is no divine spark, that’s hogwash. From a truly scientific standpoint, we are machines built with organic matter. Our ones and zeros are the same as the machines we create, we just can’t deal with the fact that we aren’t as special as we like to think. We derive meaning from our individuality, and to lose that would mean that we aren’t individual. However, we are deterministic.

If you woke up this morning and relived the same day that you already have, and had no prior knowledge of what had happened the previous time you experienced it, and no other changes were made to your environment, you would do the same thing that you did the first time, without fail. If you painted, you would paint the same image. If you ate breakfast, you would eat the same breakfast. How do we know this? Because you’ve already done it. Why does it work this way? Because nothing had changed, and your ones and zeros flipped in the same sequences. There is no “chaos”. There is no “random”. Nothing is original because everything is the way it is because of everything else. When you look at it from that bird’s eye perspective, you see that a human mind making “art” is no different than an LLM, or some form of generative AI. Stimulus is our prompt, and our output is what our machine minds create from that prompt.

Our “black box” may be more obscure and complex than current technology is for AI, but that doesn’t make it different any more than a modern sports car is different than a Model T. Both serve the same function.