That's interesting. I am young so I don't know what actually is creativity. Could you explain that part for me?
Basically can you provide a new perspective on solving a problem that hasn't been considered or a new way of looking at an existing idea in a new way to unlock a path.
He does have some answers, such as “human creativity is the ability to create an infinite range of outputs from a finite range of inputs that nonetheless pertain to our motivations/context in some useful way”, but that’s obviously not a very satisfying answer. It tells us a little — I think Tao is gesturing to exactly this when he complains that GPTo1 can only apply and combine mathematical approaches within a sort of closed domain rather than propose radically new ones - but it’s not helpful for an everyday understanding of creativity. IMO :)
In his words, from Language and Mind:
"Roughly, where we deal with cognitive structures, either in a mature state of knowledge and belief or in the initial state, we face problems, but not mysteries. When we ask how humans make use of these cognitive structures, how and why they make choices and behave as they do, although there is much that we can say as human beings with intuition and insight, there is little, I believe, that we can say as scientists…
What I have called elsewhere 'the creative aspect of language use' remains as much a mystery to us as it was to the Cartesians who discussed it, in part, in the context of the problem of 'other minds."
This way, it was possible to simply replace the element with the last array element, then decrease the size of the array by one. I'd say that's pretty creative: whoever came up with this was able identify what can be traded off to make the previously impossible, possible, unlocking new scales and possibilities.
In practice, I'd say creativity is often being able to manifest people's qualia in some unprecedented way. For example, say you're experimenting in your DAW, and discover a pretty cool sound. You identify the ways it can be used to emote and then utilize it in a work. If you really stumbled upon a sound that a lot of people find as emotive as you did, you just did something creative: it's as if you translated the qualia of an emotion into sound.
This qualia to manifestation is what's behind creativity in all of senses of the word I believe. In my previous example, discovering that orderedness is not actually a strict requirement, and (ab)using that to significantly alter the scaling of such an action is creative, because it undoes the notion that orderedness is a requirement. It goes against what's natural, but in a way that becomes extremely natural and indispensable once realized.
I think, in that way, current AIs are trained to be uncreative, since being creative inherently requires experimentation that is unaligned with the normal.
In fairness, that is an extremely standard trick so it's reasonably unlikely that the author came up with it themselves.
You've have to invent some new domain I guess and see if it could be creative within that domain. Difficult to think of a good test though.