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Category: Creativity

Generative AI is challenging a 234-year-old law

Generative AI is challenging a 234-year-old law

Alex Reisner writes: It took Ralph Ellison seven years to write Invisible Man. It took J. D. Salinger about 10 to write The Catcher in the Rye. J. K. Rowling spent at least five years on the first Harry Potter book. Writing with the hope of publishing is always a leap of faith. Will you finish the project? Will it find an audience? Whether authors realize it or not, the gamble is justified to a great extent by copyright. Who…

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The rise of AI and the death of originality

The rise of AI and the death of originality

Ray Nayler writes: The problem for AI is that creative work is not predictable. It is not about statistical likelihood or simply mashing up the familiar—it is about leaps in logic and counterintuitive juxtapositions. It is about the unique experience of the individual, and seeking to do what has never been done before. It is about the least predictable next word or pixel. So the danger is not that AI programs will write the next great novel or create the…

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Imagination makes us human – this unique ability to envision what doesn’t exist has a long evolutionary history

Imagination makes us human – this unique ability to envision what doesn’t exist has a long evolutionary history

Your brain can imagine things that haven’t happened or that don’t even exist. agsandrew/iStock via Getty Images Plus By Andrey Vyshedskiy, Boston University You can easily picture yourself riding a bicycle across the sky even though that’s not something that can actually happen. You can envision yourself doing something you’ve never done before – like water skiing – and maybe even imagine a better way to do it than anyone else. Imagination involves creating a mental image of something that…

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Imagination: It might be the core of what human brains evolved to do

Imagination: It might be the core of what human brains evolved to do

Philip Ball writes: ‘To me,’ wrote William Blake in 1799, ‘this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination.’ The imagination, he later added, ‘is not a state: it is the human existence itself.’ Blake, a painter as well as a poet, created images that acquire their power not only from a certain naive artistic technique, but because they are striving to transcend it – to convey a vision of the world beyond superficial appearances, which only imagination…

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In big tech’s dystopia, cat videos earn millions while real artists beg for tips

In big tech’s dystopia, cat videos earn millions while real artists beg for tips

John Harris writes: Online tipping is now spreading fast – and beyond music services. With a view to familiarising people with spending money inside their domains, most of the big internet companies are joining in. Twitter has just launched a feature called Tip Jar, aimed at channelling donations to “creators, journalists, experts, and non-profits”. YouTube is expanding a feature called Applause that does the same for its influencers and video-makers; the new audio app Clubhouse, recently valued at $1bn, has…

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Scientists think play is valuable, but they’re not quite sure why

Scientists think play is valuable, but they’re not quite sure why

By Chris Woolston Anyone who has ever chucked a tennis ball in the general vicinity of a border collie knows that some animals take play very seriously. The intense stare, the tremble of anticipation, the apparent joy with every bounce, all in pursuit of inedible prey that tastes like the backyard. Dogs are far from the only animals that devote considerable time and energy to play. Juvenile wasps wrestle with hive mates, otters toss rocks between their paws, and human…

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Neanderthals helped create early human art, researcher says

Neanderthals helped create early human art, researcher says

The Guardian reports: When Neanderthals, Denisovans and homo sapiens met one another 50,000 years ago, these archaic and modern humans not only interbred during the thousands of years in which they overlapped, but they exchanged ideas that led to a surge in creativity, according to a leading academic. Tom Higham, a professor of archaeological science at the University of Oxford, argues that their exchange explains “a proliferation of objects in the archaeological record”, such as perforated teeth and shell pendants,…

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Why computers will never write good novels

Why computers will never write good novels

Angus Fletcher writes: You’ve been hoaxed. The hoax seems harmless enough. A few thousand AI researchers have claimed that computers can read and write literature. They’ve alleged that algorithms can unearth the secret formulas of fiction and film. That Bayesian software can map the plots of memoirs and comic books. That digital brains can pen primitive lyrics and short stories—wooden and weird, to be sure, yet evidence that computers are capable of more. But the hoax is not harmless. If…

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What time feels like when you’re improvising

What time feels like when you’re improvising

Heather Berlin writes: Don’t look at the clock! Now tell me: How much time has passed since you first logged on to your computer today? Time may be a property of physics, but it is also a property of the mind, which ultimately makes it a product of the brain. Time measures out and shapes our lives, and how we live our lives in turn affects how we perceive the passage of time. Your sense of time is malleable and…

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Why walking helps us think

Why walking helps us think

Ferris Jabr writes: In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by…

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Do we possess a transpersonal imagination?

Do we possess a transpersonal imagination?

John Horgan writes: I’m still mulling over a meeting I attended last month at Esalen, the spiritual retreat center, on “exceptional experiences” that challenge conventional science. More specifically, I’m mulling over imagination. What generates it, and what are its limits, if any? Is it sometimes more akin to revelation than invention? Imagination is arguably the quintessential human trait. Our capacity to imagine the consequences of our choices gives us free will. Lacking imagination, we’d lack art, science, mathematics, technology and…

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The accidental book review that made Jack Kerouac famous

The accidental book review that made Jack Kerouac famous

Ronald K.L. Collins writes: In early September 1957, Jack Kerouac achieved the dream of every writer. Around midnight he and his girlfriend, Joyce Glassman, left her brownstone apartment in New York City for a nearby newsstand at Broadway and 66th Street. They waited while the nightman cut the twine around the morning edition of the New York Times. Rifling through the paper, they found on Page 27 an expected review of Kerouac’s new book, “On the Road.” Glassman recalled that…

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What makes a polymath?

What makes a polymath?

David Robson writes: If it weren’t for an actress and a pianist, GPS and WiFi might not exist. In the late 1930s and early 40s, Hedy Lamarr was already the toast of Hollywood, famed for her portrayals of femme fatales. Few of her contemporaries knew that her other great passion was inventing. (She had previously designed more streamlined aeroplanes for a lover, the aviation tycoon Howard Hughes.) Lamarr met a kindred spirit in George Antheil, however – an avant-garde pianist,…

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Our imagination has access to the pre-linguistic, ancestral mind

Our imagination has access to the pre-linguistic, ancestral mind

Stephen T Asma writes: Imagination is intrinsic to our inner lives. You could even say that it makes up a ‘second universe’ inside our heads. We invent animals and events that don’t exist, we rerun history with alternative outcomes, we envision social and moral utopias, we revel in fantasy art, and we meditate both on what we could have been and on what we might become. Animators such as Hayao Miyazaki, Walt Disney and the people at Pixar Studios are…

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A mathematician on how to get a stuck mind moving

A mathematician on how to get a stuck mind moving

Dan Rockmore writes: My job is to come up with ideas. Sometimes we mathematicians call the things we think about and work with “objects,” which doesn’t mean triangles, spheres, or other shapes. Mathematical objects are big ideas about algebra, geometry, and logic, about the properties and definitions of numbers. It’s not at all obvious how to go about thinking up some new twist on these things—the transformation from test-taker to theorem poser and then theorem prover is difficult to articulate….

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We live in a one track world but anyone can become a polymath

We live in a one track world but anyone can become a polymath

Robert Twigger writes: I travelled with Bedouin in the Western Desert of Egypt. When we got a puncture, they used tape and an old inner tube to suck air from three tyres to inflate a fourth. It was the cook who suggested the idea; maybe he was used to making food designed for a few go further. Far from expressing shame at having no pump, they told me that carrying too many tools is the sign of a weak man;…

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