In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea", then how did the ideas that we are pulling from, deriving from and combining come into existence?
If all we are saying is that existing ideas inspire new ones, or that most human generated content is derivative, then I completely agree with you. I don't see how that proposition could be controversial at all.
But it seems to me that some people, at some points in time, somewhere have and will continue to contribute something original at least on occasion. Even if the "original" idea is 1% of the "intellectual product" and 99% is reusing existing concepts. To insist otherwise is to insist that we hit peak human innovation somewhere along the line and there's nowhere left to go.
Of course there are original ideas. "C is not an original idea, because it's just mixing A and B..." ok so there are only two possbilities:
1. Someone else did mixing A and B before. Okay then we can recursively find the first person who mixed A and B.
2. No one else did mixing A and B before. The "Mixing A and B" is a new idea.
For some incomprehensible reasons, people seem to accept "mixing A and B is not a new idea because A and B already exist." Like... why? Since the four basic nucleobase existed, there haven't been any new DNA creatures?
The real reason that it feels like there isn't new idea is simple: the "mixing" process happens gradually. Even if you come up with a really good "X + Z" idea, people (read: market) might not accept it because what they're familiar with is "X + Y".
So you put a bit of Z to make "X + 0.9Y + 0.1Z", and another person who is as smart as you makes "X + 0.8Y + 0.2Z"... then when "X + Z" is officially a thing, people outside think you smart-ass guys were all just copying & pasting each other.
In copyright-law (and I think patents?), there is the Threshold of originality. Basically you evaluate how much work and change went into something, to distinguish it from other works. Which IMHO comes down to how much of a and b can you still see in the mix, and how much did mixing them changed them in the end product. If the change is low, then people more likely consider it as not innovative.
Or how Homer Simpson once said: “People are afraid of new things. You should have taken an existing product and put a clock in it or something.”
The threshold for originality in copyright is the bare minimum, so it's not a good standard for "invention". Patents have a much higher bar to overcome, and it is hard to put into a simple explanatory phrase.
I think what you are describing in copyright isn't the issue of originality, but determining what is encompassed in a copyrighted work. The court will analyze what the work consists of, and what of it was your expression, as opposed to someone else's. So, it's not novelty exactly but it's close.
Copyright exemptions (fair use/fair dealing etc) are a million times more complex than that. There are times when one adds almost nothing yet will still get protection. Take political humor. A standard bit is just to point out something funny. Look at how often political comics (John oliver/stewart etc) just play a clip of some politician. No edits. No commentary. The clip speaks for itself. That is still protected speech. Understanding how the comic adds to the clip cannot be expressed in numbers.
But now that we have software that can generate massive amounts of "Mixing A and B" ideas automatically... I dunno, seems like we're heading toward a sort of "pollution of the idea atmosphere" where we get a ton of new/remixed ideas dumped into the world that haven't passed through that initial filter of a human vetting them as particularly useful or valuable or interesting in the first place.
We already have that. Observe: ahem “It is an industrial capacity, that many people like the Reddit poem person who does the cow thing. And everyone delighted in the nonsense of words that are sense.” Or, perhaps you want something on-topic? “Your ideas about ideas are mere ideas. Ideas that are ideas are ideas, but these ideas are not ideas. lol!” Perhaps an unoriginal, unfiltered synthesis of some good ideas? “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a potato peeler could save you 5 Altairian dollars a day.”
We don't need AI to produce unoriginal, unfiltered internet comments. Certain YouTube comments sections provide a great example (though the problem with YouTube comments isn't as bad as people tend to make out). We humans already have social mechanisms to keep the good ideas and ditch the bad ideas, even when many of the humans aren't bothering to filter their own output.
So, was that real creativity, or not? If not, why not? If the parts are really "basic", they didn't come from other, pre-existing parts.
And if it was real creativity, why is it impossible for us to do the same?
I don't believe originality is that valuable. It's a positive term to me, but just slightly.
I've seen a lot people on HN credit the SV companies' "free food" practice to google. Do they believe free food for your employees is a new idea that someone in google came up with? I don't think so.
With such definition, GPT-4 can create new ideas.
At least GPT brings funding sometimes.
I often take it a step further and use it as a reminder that new ideas are rarely born from one person but rather the contributions of many, each too small to be noticed as an “original idea”, but when viewed collectively, can be revolutionary.
So many advancements (like the airplane) often get invented simultaneously by different people in completely different areas of the globe without any connection to each other.
"A fax machine is just a telephone and a waffle iron!" —Abraham Simpson
This is the root of the objection to AI. To say that humans are similar would imply that a person's thoughts are a function of their sensory experiences, and that is not a popular view.
Similarly, people like to think that a person's behavior is not a mere function of their experience- that they are capable of "choosing" how to react to their circumstances. They will accept no explanation that appeals to material conditions or biology. A man steals bread not because he is poor and hungry, nor because of some chemical reaction in his brain, but because he "chose" to steal. The part that chooses would his "soul", which cannot be explained in terms of cause-and-effect.
There’s a much richer discussion going on about current-generation AI and its prospects that is grounded in plainly materialist and technical insights, with thoughtful differences of opinion about what current research demonstrates and about what the sophistication of biological/neurological machines may involve in comparison.
You might find that conversation more enriching if you tune into it instead of the one you seem to be focused on.
And the obvious answer of course is that recycling / mixing can be innovative and creative. The dichotomy only exists in our heads.
I believe this is because of how our culture choose to reward intelectual output. Your output needs to appear sufficiently original to be worthy of reward and protection.
For example a musician who creates a new song is not rewarded, in fact punished for naming all the influences they had coming in to said new song. (both morally, by people who would think less of them, and by lawsuits asking for a share of their profit.)
You might have missed that I was stating my belief. I can only cite myself as the ultimate authority on what beliefs I have or don't have.
If instead of believing something I will know something you will notice from the lack of "I believe" and the appropriate citations. If we would need to provide citations for any belief we could not talk about theories and ideas we have which as of yet lack the sufficient evidentiary backing.
Now of course it sounds like what you are trying to express is that you are disagreeing with my belief. Which is perfectly fine.
> There are plenty of these “inside the studio” type interviews where an artist describes at length their inspirations and the other artists they admired and wanted to mimic in some way.
Yes. Humans are full of contradictions therefore you won't see black-and-white behaviour from them.
But I think the way you have put it here is more clear than anything I've been able to manage. I think I put it in a more extreme form, which is to say that the earth had no life on it for ~3 billion years, and still no humans until ~100k years ago. At some point the first music was made. And if it could be original then, whatever it was that made that possible, should presumably make it possible now, too.
If you listen to the stories of how things like major inventions came into being, it's almost always some domain expert visited some domain in which they were not an expert and inspiration struck on how to combine the domains.
Otherwise, the rest of invention is either human imitations or improvements to things found in nature or not inventions at all but discoveries stumbled upon by accident/experimentation.
Nothing is just willed into existence by pure "thought". Every thought you've had is a product of the things you've been surrounded by.
There's a million things today that didn't exist back then, and many things that came to exist culturally over time, or were discovered. Do you think they were sitting around the fire talking about how the molecular motion registers as a conscious heat sensation in animals or what the proper interpretation of QM is?
Digital simulations are self-explanatory - All things simulated must have an existing thing they are simulating. Digital is one type of representation of an already existing thing. It can be seen as a subclass of concept/drawing/painting/.
Branching timelines are more abstract, but it's ultimately based on the idea of a tree. Dilemmas over branching decisions have existed as long as we have been able to think. We branch timelines in our imaginations while playing chess or doing any strategic endeavor where decisions and responses to those decisions matter. FFT: Decision tree, binary tree, random forests, etc. These don't quite cover the complexity of QM, but it's hard to ignore that there is overlap.
A nuke is a type of bomb, which is a type of rapid expansion, which is just an expansion of something (volcano, lightning, comets, etc...)
My friend's point was that of course a caveman won't be thinking about quantum mechanics, but they were thinking about the more basic things that ultimately led to their descendants thinking about QM.
Just food for thought.
But when you start to scrutinize everything they did, there are many clear examples of things and people that did those things first and directly influenced them. However, they may have been the first to do it in their specific flavor, which is undoubtedly original.
The most original thing I can think of that The Beatles did was add sound to the runoff track at the end of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, so that it keeps playing the sound infinitely until the needle is removed on the turntable. I’m sure someone with more insight can point to another musician doing that first, but at The Beatles’ scale, we collectively come to believe they were the first to do it.
Somewhere around 2016, when the golden Age of Internet-Content ended, as the last undiscovered part was added to the mix...
But jokes aside, does innovation really need to be new? Or would it still innovative if you don't know it when you create something you for you? Take for example all the retro-waves which regularly come back, where people discover something for them completely new, and make up some for them completely new things, which the generations for them already did long ago.
> In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea"
Does Original mean 100% new? And would it demand that all parts are new, or would it still original if we just arrange old parts in a new way?
There is a huge amount of information flowing around us in realtime, and linking some thought/thing to something else, which then might have implications (subsequent discoveries) is statistics. We do have people with a better wetware so they have increased %chance do recognize something in front of them as well as linking it in a "novel way", but this is not really neccessary, it only increases %chances.
Even pretty radical things can be explained this exact way, up to having some sort of brain "damage" (or drugs like LSD) that changes mental pathways and have a %chance to be actually right and lead to discoveries, but also the %chance here is very low. (not every trip is a breakthrough in art/science, right?)... a bit like iE people that can smell sounds or link some natural phenomenon with an emotional situation between some people and write about it.
> peak human innovation
that might simply a nonsense question if you follow my previous argument. there simply is no real "innovation" - only "discoveries" of stuff. and we meatbags with very limitied/unreliable wetware at some point can't "progress" any more, but non-biologically flawed systems might overcome our limitations and do just that for us.
with our naked eyes, we cannot see things like infrared light, but it exists and some tools helped us to understand everything around it somewhat. now we're building more advanced tooling to get through the next plateaus - just like we have to build very sophisticated tooling to watch further into space or more closely into fractions of atoms, which in turn lead to more discoveries, and ultimately "innovation" we can feel in our lives.
the only thing I will 100% agree to is that a real AGI will be the _last_ discovery/innovation humanity will ever make - and that is a good thing - it means we finally overcome our biological limits somewhat.
Nothin' you can sing that can't be sung
Nothin' you can say, but you can learn how to play the game
It's easy
Nothin' you can make that can't be made
No one you can save that can't be saved
Nothin' you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time
It's easy
All you need is love
There will be a big leap forward when we get to teaching these things from video streams so they can get the concept of 3D properly.
Read How to Ride a Bicycle. Human creativity is just a lot of work, often connecting novel ideas together while doing so.
Your question contains the answer. Remixing begets innovation / creativity begets remixing.
Its only words and concepts and we keep inventing new ones constantly. We also imbue new meaning to words and concepts over time.
How do you distinguish this from survivorship bias? There were probably tons of shitty artists 100 years ago but you haven't heard of them.
> It's no coincidence that most image generation prompts have an existing artist or style in them.
I've been thinking about this. I don't think it's evidence that anything is getting worse, because a lot of the prompts people use are referring to recent artists/styles. Is it possible that leaving out the style/artist leads to an average of every style which doesn't really work?
By observing nature, and then iterating on that over thousands of years of culture. Of course the question is whether and to what degree the process of iteration and transformation matters.
How would you define an "original idea?" An idea with no origin or source, that spontaneously manifests from the aether? That isn't possible, everything must be extrapolated from something prior.
Or did it ever stop ?
