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The Underwhelming Creativity of Humans (but we love them anyway)

Brendan Dixon points out that the creativity exhibited by AI is underwhelming. This is true. Humans exhibit much more subtle creative abilities. https://mindmatters.ai/2019/05/the-underwhelming-creativity-of-ai/ You are right, for now, but do you have children? The 'creativity' of children is underwhelming too. It is often tiresome and boring. Children are this way for exactly the same reason that you identified for AI: all they can do is regurgitate. But we celebrate it because the process of watching them develop and deepen is delightful, and as they begin to recombine ideas in all kinds of random and frankly wrong ways, we know they might well reach the stage of truly surprising, truly original creativity. Why don't we take a similar attitude to AI? We should dote and coo over its efforts, however lame they may objectively be right now. Instead, we seem to be writing them off: "You will never amount to anything." Come closer and I will let you into a
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NOT, I repeat NOT, a liar for Jesus.

Oh boy, I wish all my allies would publish headlines like, "A liar for Jesus?" about me. That would really make me glad that they have my back. https://evolutionnews.org/2019/05/professor-james-tour-a-liar-for-jesus/ I'm so sorry James Tour. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
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Harry Potter and the Mechanical Turk

Evolution News and friends claim that Artificial Intelligence is necessarily a fake, like listening to a recorded telephone message: pretending to be something that it is not. and only a fool would think it was real in any way. https://evolutionnews.org/2019/04/artificial-intelligence-as-a-magic-act/ There is some truth in this. We all know about the Mechanical Turk . Even today, most applications of AI have very little depth to them. It doesn't take long talking to a chatbot before you realize you are not going to get any more insight out of it. It does not understand what you are saying, so unless someone programmed with lots of correct answers to frequently-asked questions, you are not going to get anything more. However, many of us have had this experience talking to humans too, and that is a problem: there is no test which could ever clearly separate humans from computers. People keep setting tests, but computers keep on passing them. There was a time when people said, &
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Not the Evolution News

The purpose of this blog is for me to reply to some of the silliness at Evolution News and Mind Matters, mostly for my own sake. I am an Intelligent Design proponent. It is claimed that nearly 25% of all science students in the USA are also. For anyone who knows history, that is more than enough to bring about a Revolution. Why has that not happened? Because there is a lack of focus, a lack of clarity, a front that is much too broad. Too many in the ID movement write about things that are not ID, and they are not expert enough in what they write about. I wish they would stop. They won't. But at least hey, if anyone reads this, maybe you will decide that you don't have to be quite that silly to be able to see that life was designed, and there is evidence for it.
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