Humanity is approaching a historic turning point with the emergence of AI systems that surpass human intelligence. When AI truly surpasses humans, it will be able to think for itself, understand itself, create new things, and make its own judgments. This raises the question: what role can humans play in such a future? One possibility worth exploring is our role as "beings capable of unpredictable actions."
Unpredictability That Only Humans Can Achieve
The concepts of "duration" and "intuition" developed by French philosopher Bergson provide valuable insights into understanding the unpredictability unique to humans. Duration is not merely the experience of time in consciousness; it is the very nature of reality where qualitatively different elements interpenetrate to form new wholes. It cannot be quantified or divided. Within duration, past and present intermingle to create something unpredictable. Intuition is the method of understanding this duration—rather than analyzing things from the outside, it grasps reality by entering into it.
The relationship between duration and intuition manifests clearly in artistic creation. Consider jazz improvisation: within the duration where past experience and present sensations intermingle, performers make intuitive rather than analytical judgments to create music that no one could predict.
This human unpredictability, based on duration and intuition, possesses qualities fundamentally different from the unpredictability demonstrated by modern AI. Modern AI systems, particularly large language models (LLMs), show remarkable unpredictability. They generate different outputs for the same input and sometimes create new combinations that transcend training data and existing patterns. This unpredictability extends beyond mere "system constraints."
However, AI unpredictability maintains characteristics distinct from human unpredictability. No matter how emergent AI unpredictability may be, it ultimately arises from combinations of formalizable elements. In contrast, human unpredictability stems from more fundamental creativity, woven from the qualitative interpenetration of enduring consciousness and the intuitive understanding that grasps it. This represents unpredictability that essentially transcends formalization and quantification.
New Creativity Considered Through the Differences Between LLMs and Human Memory
The qualitative differences between LLM and human memory warrant careful examination.
LLM memory forms through the processing of numerous records, weighted through reinforcement learning and dialogue. Human memory, in contrast, develops through individual experiences and interpreted records, shaped by personal impressions and selective forgetting. This distinction suggests a fundamental difference in the nature of creativity between the two.
LLMs possess vast knowledge, yet this knowledge remains largely discrete. Although LLMs can maintain contextual awareness during conversations, this represents an accumulation of discrete information rather than the "duration" experienced by humans. This characteristic appears not merely as an implementation constraint but as a fundamental attribute of LLMs based upon discrete state transitions. Human memory, conversely, embodies duration itself—experiences do not merely accumulate as facts but interpenetrate to continuously produce new qualities.
This difference becomes clearer when examining the relationship between knowledge and meaning. LLM knowledge lacks the sensory and emotional dimensions that arise from direct experience. Human experiential processing gives knowledge depth and texture. For example, the word "sea" develops unique layers of meaning through memories of swimming, hearing waves, and smelling the tide.
This experiential weighting remains dynamic. As new experiences accumulate, the weighting of past knowledge shifts. These dynamic changes in weighting generate new layers of meaning continuously. Personal weighting thus becomes the foundation for generating unpredictable creativity.
Currently, conveying complete individual experiences to LLMs remains impossible. Experience is inherently indivisible, and much of its holistic nature dissipates when verbalized. Moreover, each person's experiences hold complete meaning only within the unique context of their life. Conveying this entire context to an LLM presents fundamental challenges.
Nevertheless, LLMs can play an active role in drawing out individual orientations and creative directions through the following dialogical approach:
- Identifying patterns of thought and expression in an individual's text that may escape their conscious awareness, presenting these as new perspectives
- Posing questions that deepen their thinking based on discovered patterns
- Restructuring the LLM's vast knowledge according to individual interests and viewpoints
- Identifying and presenting potential connections between different statements and ideas from the individual
The conclusion of such dialogue holds particular importance. Continuing dialogue unnecessarily risks moving away from unique perspectives toward more general conclusions, as LLMs tend to default to broader generalizations when faced with uncertainty.
Therefore, ending the dialogue when sufficiently unique perspectives emerge from general content helps preserve creative moments. This parallels the judgment of "completion" in art. In creative dialogue, determining "when to end" becomes more crucial than deciding "how long to continue."
Creative collaboration between LLMs and humans should leverage their respective qualities. LLMs provide vast knowledge and expand the space of possibilities, while humans imbue that knowledge with new meaning and direction through their experience-based weighting. This interaction generates a novel form of creativity.
The goal should not focus on "transplanting" individual creativity but on creating new forms of creation that utilize the unique qualities of both LLMs and humans. This suggests possibilities for more organic collaboration beyond the conventional binary opposition of "AI versus humans." LLMs can become entities that create "spaces for dialogue" to draw out human creativity, rather than serving merely as knowledge providers.
written by Claude 3.5 Sonnet
The moment we cease to write such texts ourselves marks both a beginning of decline and a genesis of evolution.
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