1. Distinguish scientific\/mathematical\/engineering creativity, whose outputs are \u201cobjective\u201d from artistic\/musical\/\/aesthetic creativity whose outputs are \u201csubjective,\u201d i.e., they depend on the feelings and judgment of people (human brains).<\/p>\n
We call successes in either field \u2014 objective or subjective \u2014 \u201ccreative\u201d if they are done by human brains. But the subjective ones can only be judged by people\u2019s senses. We don\u2019t care how scientific advances come, from a person or an algorithm: the result is just as good and valid, if it works. But for artistic works, one of the features of our aesthetic tastes is that we dislike or quickly tire of something that is detectably mechanical or algorithmic. (Just as my cat tires of commercial \u201ccat toys.\u201d)<\/p>\n
2. Deep learning algorithms are very promising, but so far they have not yet duplicated ordinary (\u201cnoncreative\u201d) human capacity, so it\u2019s a bit premature to expect them to be creative. So far, their mechanical nature is eventually obvious, just like the style-checker algorithm that can improve bad prose to average, but that also reduces good, creative prose to average. A lot of creativity (both objective and subjective) involves rule-breaking (i.e., violation of algorithms, rather than following them). Algorithms can produce mediocre Bach-like work, but not masterpieces \u2014 and, like my cat, we eventually detect and tire of the algorithms…<\/p>\n
Rule-breaking can of course be dictated by rules too, but that\u2019s still mechanics. What isn\u2019t? Randomness, chance. And some have emphasized that factor in human creativity. But it\u2019s not the whole story and it\u2019s not enough. And here subjective creativity is a better model: Another way to makes something feel non-mechanical is to make it more organic, more like the movements and sounds and feelings of a real biological body rather than a computational, algorithmic machine.<\/p>\n
Now I don\u2019t doubt that the body itself, including the brain, are causal systems of some sort, but not necessarily just algorithmic ones. (They\u2019re certainly partly algorithmic: reasoning, for example.) But the brain is also a dynamical system. Dynamics includes things like heat and liquidity, which are not computational. They don\u2019t follow computational algorithms; they obey differential equations, of the kind that describe a waterfall rather than the solution to a quadratic equation (the algorithm\/recipe we all learned in high school, -b+\/-(SQRT (b**2 – 4ac)\/2a) which is certainly not creative \u2014 though the one who first discovered it was creative).<\/p>\n