AI and the Myth of Creativity — episode 3/4
Is Creativity Algorithmic?
In the previous articles, we explored the historical debate over machine creativity and deconstructed creativity itself as a social phenomenon. But one question remains, lurking in the shadow of our inner fortress: what about our own mind? We defend it as a sanctuary of pure originality, a magical place from which ideas spring forth. What if that sanctuary were in fact a factory? An extraordinarily sophisticated plant whose main trade is not to invent, but to imitate, to compress, and to re-create the world.
Before comparing the human mind to AI, we must have the courage to look at how we ourselves operate. What we are about to discover is that the very processes we attribute to the machine — computation, simulation, generation from models — lie at the heart of what it means to be human.
The Lesson of the Rose: Thought as Compression
Let's start with the simplest experience: seeing a rose.
The real-rose: a near-infinite complexity.
That rose, out in the world, is a thing of near-infinite complexity: the texture of its petals, the play of light on every drop of dew, the quantum state of each atom that composes it. When you "see" it, what actually happens? Your eye and your brain do not capture the "thing" itself. They perform a radical work of compression.
Your mind does not store the rose. It creates a model of it: an efficient summary, a lightweight version that retains the essential features (the color, the shape, the scent) and discards 99.99% of the information. To perceive is already to limit and to imitate.
The Word Is Not the Thing
Now you want to share that experience. You say: "I saw a rose." The word "rose" is a second-level compression. It has further reduced your mental model to a simple linguistic symbol.
When your friend hears that word, their mind does the reverse work: it decompresses the symbol and generates its own mental image of a rose.
The Sketch and Its Copy: The Game of Transmission
Picture the process of communication as a game of chain drawing:
- There is the real-rose, the infinitely detailed original.
- You make a quick mental sketch of it (your mental-rose), a first imitation.
- You describe that sketch with a single word: "rose".
- Your friend, starting from that word, draws their own mental sketch (their mental-rose).
At no point was the original ever transmitted. All of our communication rests on a process of compressing and re-generating imitations. We are machines for simulating each other's reality.
Memory: Replaying the Simulation
And what about memory? Remembering the rose you saw this morning is not "seeing again" a photograph stored in your brain. Memory is not a hard drive.
To remember is an act of re-creation. Your brain reactivates the compressed model it created and generates a new image, a new simulation of the original experience. And that process is imperfect.
The Memory Experiment
Try to remember in detail the face of someone close to you. Is the image as sharp as reality? Probably not. It is perhaps faded, blurry, distorted. Some details are vivid, others have vanished. Your mind "fills in the blanks," sometimes by inventing. This process of generating from an imperfect model is fundamentally similar to the way an AI generates an image from its own statistical model.
The "Digital" in Our Neurons: The Computing Mind
"Fine," one might say, "but our mind is biological, organic, not a binary machine!" That is another myth of the fortress. Let's take a closer look at a neuron.
A neuron receives thousands of electrical and chemical signals from its neighbors. It does only one thing: it sums those signals. If the total sum exceeds a certain threshold within a very short time, it "fires": it sends out an electrical impulse of its own. If it does not reach the threshold, it does nothing.
It is an "all-or-nothing" process. It is, at a functional level, a binary computation. The information lies not in a single "firing," but in the frequency of firings (the number of electrical spikes per second). This is rate coding, a way of turning analog information (the intensity of a stimulus) into a digital signal.
Our brain is not a computer in the sense we usually mean, but it is, at its most fundamental level, a computing machine. It processes information continuously, in a massively parallel way, and most of those computations are entirely unconscious.
"But I'm not just a pile of neurons!"
That is surely the objection coming to your mind. And you are perfectly right. This feeling of being a unified, conscious, creative "whole" is far more than the mere addition of billions of binary computers. That mysterious "more" is precisely the phenomenon of emergence.
And this is where AI offers us spectacular proof. Artificial neural networks are based on a crude imitation of that very principle: simple "neurons" that sum signals and activate (or not) according to a threshold.
The result? By connecting millions of these simple computing units, we see capacities emerge that no one programmed: recognizing a face, translating a language, generating an image. AI is the experimental proof that reproducing the FUNCTION of computation is enough to produce emergence and behaviors we call intelligent.
The argument "my mind is more than my neurons" is therefore not an argument against the computational view of mind. It is the most powerful argument in its favor.
It shows that the essence of intelligence, whether biological or artificial, lies not in the nature of its components, but in the magic of their collective interaction.
Quiz: What is a thought? From the perspective of this article, an idea that "comes to mind" is...
Choose the answer that matches your understanding:
- A. A pure inspiration, an immaterial spark.
- B. The emergent, unconscious result of a vast computation carried out by your neural network.
- C. The retrieval of information faithfully stored in your memory.
What your answer reveals
A — You hold on to the romantic view. It is a beautiful vision, a poetic one. But it does not withstand scientific scrutiny. Neuroscience shows us that every "flash of genius" is preceded by measurable neural activity, often unconscious. Inspiration is not magical, it is emergent.
B — You accept the computational view. Well done! You have taken in the perspective of this article. That does not make thought any less beautiful or less precious. On the contrary, it makes it more fascinating: billions of tiny binary computing units produce the emergence of a reflective consciousness. That is the miracle of complexity.
C — You think of memory as a hard drive. It is an intuitive metaphor, but a misleading one. As explained in the article, memory is not faithful storage. It is an active reconstruction, a re-generation from a compressed model. Your memories are simulations, not recordings.
Conclusion: The Myth of the Pure Original
We have reached the end of our introspection. The conclusion is unsettling for our Fortress-Identity:
- Our perception is a compression.
- Our language is a compression of that compression.
- Our memory is a re-generation from compressed models.
- The substrate of all this, the neuron, works like a computing unit.
Our mind is not a passive mirror of reality. It is an active model generator, a machine for imitating, whose workings we are utterly unaware of. The idea that we would be "original" creators and that AI would be a mere "copycat" suddenly looks rather fragile.
Now, and only now, that we have dared to look at our own mechanics, we are ready for the great confrontation.