Why AI Can't Replicate Human Creativity | Dr. Fei-Fei Li & Dr. Andrew Huberman

Brain Function & AI Limits

00:00Let's go to a really far out there aspect of brain function that we know exists in humans, which is thoughts and creativity. Now, there are probably rules for thoughts and creativity. They're a little bit harder to tack down than um examples from the visual system, like if it's a tail and it's indoors, it's likely a cat.

00:23This kind of thing, but they're there. The rules are there. If you use Apple as an example, we could have gone from low level seeing an apple to midle seeing Apple always drop not fly off at the highest level. What is the equation that governs the Apple's movement right?

00:43So that's ascending to like a higher order more reductionist analysis. What do you think about the idea that while AI is indeed intelligent, it can do things that brains can do, maybe even well certainly things that individual human brains can't do.

00:57We know this by virtue of beating humans at chess and this sort of thing. The idea right now, as I understand it, is that AI is trained on the internet, images, discussions, videos, songs, but that's not all of human cognition, right? So, are there aspects of AI that are whether or not it's chat or it's claude or even the most powerful not yet released machine learning and and AI tools that don't have access to features of human brain function yet because they've never been uploaded to the internet, at least not in a way that the AI can pull out.

01:38So, for instance, you know, you could put a symphony there and it follows certain rules of music and mathematics and sound like that. That makes sense, but you have thoughts all day long and I have thoughts all day long that don't quite mesh with language in a way that I can just type them out on the internet.

01:55Stay with me here. I know this is a long question, but I feel like this is the one thing you are perfectly poised to answer, and I've been waiting to ask you this for [laughter] a year and a half since I saw you in Utah. In the world of art, we have this thing called abstraction, right?

02:08And occasionally, somebody will come up with a painting or a drawing that it doesn't look like anything specific. This happens in music, too, where you just feel something like there's like a fundamental rule or an emotion associated with it.

02:20Like they've tapped into some aspect of brain function, but you can't say what it is. I feel like this is the sort of thing that is complicated for AI or for me to understand how AI could do because you can put that piece of art into AI and say, you know, what fundamental feature of human uh experience does this reveal and it only has access to what's on the internet?

02:43So, h how can you capture a a complex constellation of feelings and experience with AI? That seems to be the gap for me. And I'm sure we'll get there with AI, but I'm not seeing from neuroscience to AI in in any kind of direct way. The same way we could ratchet through visual motion, sadness, happiness.

03:03You could pull out a lot of things, but it's hard to get to these higher order abstract representations that can't be spoken or written down or drawn. If I just say, give me your example of whatever nostalgia for your childhood home. You could write about it, but those are just words.

03:18It's not I can't understand your experience at a first person level. Totally. Andrew, I I know you put a lot of thoughts into this question and I I think it's a very important question and let's let's peel this one step at a time. First of all, TLDDR short answer is I agree with you that we do have to be very careful recognizing what AI can do, is likely to do, not conjecturing over a 100 years or or whatever.

03:51I recognize what you just said are these extremely nuanced personalized hard to characterize or not even captured human cognitive behaviors and because they were not captured they then they were not uploaded on the internet and we don't have today's AI doesn't have a way to do that.

04:18So when you call internet which is the source of AI's data, let's be very clear what is internet. Internet is not some random thing.

How the Internet Trains AI

04:33Internet is the biggest collection of human behavior in multimodal forms. Let's break it down further. Internet has the world's population typing on it for many many at this point multiple decades. That typing is a sensing mechanism that captured everything from teenager chit chitchat all the way to deep scientific articles who dig digitized and get uploaded.

05:06Right? So that capturing human language is what internet is super good at. Then internet captures images. How? Because we now have digital cameras. That's so prevalent in smartphones and digital cameras. So that humans love taking photos from you know the cat in your house to selfies to beautiful you know BBC captured photos.

05:36Those also got uploaded in our digital sphere. On top of that, there's videos. Videos now has sound, has movements that also got uploaded to our digital sphere. On top of that, there's music. We're not even getting into the legal discussion of copyrights.

05:56But let's just table that aside. I'm just talking about the forms of data. The speeches and and singing and music and orchestra that also got uploaded into the digital sphere. So now we have created this humongous library of human knowledge in words, human behavior in videos, human expressions or even nature's ex whatever in in sound and now AI gets trained on that.

06:28That is why it's so powerful. This is why especially in the words front that AI can recognize patterns can can synthesize patterns because so much of this is already there. But the thing

Uncaptured Human Thoughts

06:46that you just talked about that when let's say Picasso had that incredibly profound thought about that particular way of expressing that that portrait of the of the young woman that thought has never been captured. In fact, as neuroscientists, if I ask you which brain area did that thought come from, you don't know, right?

07:12Is it broka? Is it V1? Is it motor? Is it prefrontal? We don't know. Maybe it's diffused everywhere because that thought is so personalized, so special. You can call it creativity. You can call it emotion. You can call it whatever you want.

07:32You can call it cat 231. whatever name you can give it that thought is not captured therefore it's not on the internet therefore AI has not seen it so that is where humans still remain so unique but we also need to give credit to AI because AI has learned so many things it can combine information in highly [snorts] creative way did you

AlphaGo & AI Creativity

08:02remember move 37 this is Alph Go. Right. Right. Move 37 has symbolized AI's creativity. I think it's both true but can be taken out of context because that was a game when Alph Go was plainly so dull and in I think it's a third game out of the five games that Alph Go as a computer algorithm made a move that the human masters of Go never thought about.

08:35And that is an incredible move, right? Because it really humans collectively, these are the masters never thought about it. But if you really go deep into what AI did there, it was because first of all, goal is a highly mathematical game. It it has very clear mathematical objective, very clear mathematical rules in terms of move.

08:59So when AI having a bigger compute and um ways to retain how many moves it can uh it can remember it was able to do things that human brains don't typically do. So is that called creativity? I think it is but we do have to recognize that's a special kind of creativity.

09:22I was talking to a

AI in Mathematics

09:26incredible mathematician of our time and I was asking him about the unsolved problem of mathematics and how AI can contribute to that and he was very positive. He said there are many problems in today's mathematics. As hard as they are, even as say a field mentalist, I probably have forgotten there are known methods in math that can solve these problem because I have a human brain.

09:56I don't remember I don't know all of math's, you know, solutions in the past hundreds of years. even if I were a a field medalist. So AI can help us to solve these problems. But as a mathematician, he was also telling me he said I don't know if AI can solve all of math problems because some of these math problems require solutions that have not been invented that will push creativity to a whole different level.

10:28And this is where you you know I'm we should be curious is it going to be a human creativity or AI would go through its iterations of uh of improvement and get to a point of creativity that humans don't have or is

Hybrid Creativity & Emotion

10:45it a combined creativity. My current conjecture is hybrid is that humans working alongside AI would help us to solve these problems whose solutions have yet to be invented. And then what you said especially you touched on emotion is even more personalized.

11:03This is not necessarily logic. This is not necessarily deduct deductive reasoning. This is maybe Andrew you look at this cup and say it's a great cup. What if it evoked an emotion in me, a childhood moment that a gray cup might mean something that only me and my best friend share?

11:27That is a completely inaccessible piece of information in my brain that is never uploaded on the internet and no matter how mighty AI is today cannot access that. So that my reaction to this cup and potentially what I would do with it because of that piece of memory can be completely different.

11:53You can call it creativity, you can call it expression, you can call it storytelling, you can call it in many ways, but that's where it AI cannot access. [music] [music]