Earlier this week, Fast Company published a delightful short article by Katharine Schwab: “3 reasons why AI will never match human creativity.” It’s a quick read, so I won’t recapitulate it here beyond that neural networks “fail miserably to anticipate when a pattern will change, let alone connect one pattern to an unrelated pattern, a crucial ingredient in creativity.”
While reading Schwab’s piece, I was reminded of Harold Bloom’s famous 1973 book of literary criticism, The Anxiety of Influence. Bloom argued that poets were in dialog with their precursors, worried that the influence of the poets that went before them would be too strong, making their own poetry derivative. To fight this, they deliberately misread the precursors in order to escape them. (This synopsis is itself horribly derivative; more details are available here.)
The link between Schwab’s article and Bloom’s book is that anxiety and influence are both phenomena that algorithms do not experience.
How intriguing, then, if part of what distinctly makes humans creative is our propensity to worry about things, to doubt our abilities, to wonder if we’re original or just imitators.
Impostor Syndrome may be a necessary component of humanity and creativity.
In 1969, just a few years before Bloom’s Anxiety, sci-fi novelist Christopher Stasheff described Fess, a computer character in his novel The Warlock in Spite of Himself, as “often wrong but never uncertain.”
Humans are both often wrong and usually uncertain.
That’s one key difference between humans and algorithms.
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