It’s not a show stopper until it is. My point was that the landscape is changing so quickly that it’s hard to determine who the reliable partners are now, much less next year or three years from now. And past experience shows that if a partner becomes unreliable, people will still be upset with us.
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Well this is Moravec’s paradox: “Computers find things that we humans find hard, easy. They find things we find easy, hard” — this was beautifully framed in my academic field (Cognitive Neuroscience) when in the 60s one of the founders of the field of AI, Marvin Minsky, gave a student an “easy” summer project to work on visual perception while they worked on "hard "problems. We intuitively open our eyes and see, it is something effortless to us. Yet > 50% of the networks that comprise our brain are active whenever we do this “effortless” thing. The student failed, as did thousands of others for subsequent decades.
We intuit that art is hard, and washing up is easy. In fact, the cognitive control in terms of planning and execution, and the physical control and dexterity necessary, means that washing up is orders of magnitude harder than composing a pleasing shorter form narrative novel or visual artistic work (it is of course unlikely/impossible they can compose “revolutionary” works of art). Yes, current vision diffusion models / LLMs are mostly statistical tricks, they take prior knowledge and recompose it with some randomness, but this follows the same statistical trick we humans use: if you took Picasso or Garcia Marquez back 20,000 years and placed them with a Paleolithic tribe, they would never develop any of the art that they did. Human brains and bodies today are not recognisably any different than our Paleolithic ancestors, it is just that our brains are trained (statistically primed) with millenia of cultural development, in an analogous method to how current AI models are trained on this cultural development through language or image datasets.
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I believe the current state of cognitive neuroscience rejects the idea that human creativity depends on “statistical tricks” or that what current AI models are doing is qualitatively similar.
I also think you’re being unduly dismissive of Paleolithic art and classical literature.
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I don’t mean for “statistical tricks” to be seen as something that is negative or dismissive. A hugely popular theory of how our brain works is called “The Predictive Mind”[1] and posits that we use past experience to build a complex internal model of the world. Thought involves this generative engine that creates experience from memory and experience fused together. Evolution built a whole bunch of complex statistical tricks, each one far from optimal but together they combined to allow us to take our learnt understanding of the world, which is statistically encoded in the innumerable synapses in the brain, and forge them together.
A recent review of the neuroscience of human creativity[2] summarises this: “The evidence to date suggests that creativity is an emergent property of the dynamic interplay between spontaneous and controlled processes in the brain.” — this is in fact what LLMs / DNNs are doing as they combine seed noise and structured data to create new cultural artifacts other humans can debate the merits of on forums like this.
I find a lot of art generated by Stable Diffusion or other models fascinating and aesthetically and conceptually pleasing. The models took our cultural visual knowledge and recombined it in ways that can be totally surprising. You can argue this is emphemerally different from human creativity, but we must guard against our own ignorance of unconscious cognitive biases that blind us to the sources of our novel ideas, and additionally what definitely motivates some people: a fear of losing our special place in nature.
TLDR: I don’t think we cognitive neuroscientists reject the notion that creativity cannot be explained by the (IMO beautiful) statistical combinations that our generative and predictive brains are capable of. There is still much to learn about the complex emergent dynamics across the brain (see my comments below, these all play into creative process), and the myriad tricks evolution endowed us.
Of course, if you are a dualist, then you can argue that “creativity” and our very “consciousness” cannot be encapsulated in our understanding of the brain and instead rely on something we can never properly understand (with our current tools anyway)…
I fully agree with you here. Our brains encapsulate many more cognitive structures than the LLMs do. I’ve argued[3] that even leading vision models miss basic features that continue to elevate our perception above any AI model of vision. Yann Lecun, one of the lead researchers on the current AI wave is currently dismissive of this wave a generative AI and is telling students to go and study some other models. Those cognitive structures are discernable and approachable (see the beautiful work of developmental psychologists like Liz Spelke and collaborator Josh Tenebaum), things like executive control, intuitive physics, our episodic memory, mind wandering, embodied cognition, curiosoty, attentional shifting etc. Each piece of the puzzle are actively being tackled by cognitive scientists and they then get integrated by AI models. How many additional pieces of the puzzle do we need to fill in? That is in debate, and people like LeCun (with something like predictive world models) and others are actively building models that fill in several of those pieces.
BUT I also reject something you may be implying, that there is a categorical difference. DNNs / LLMs are comprised of artificial neurons who wire and connect together based on learning reinforced by what is right or wrong (supervision by curated data sets, or unsupervised using other methods). The processes in these neural networks broadly reflect those in our own brains, and in some cases the artificial neurons even begin to reflect the same sorts of preferences we measure from biological neurons. There is analogy between digital and biological learning, and we would also be foolish to dismiss it as categorically different.
in fact, it may be if we had a time machine and could go back and could share a language with our paleolithic ancestors, they may have much to share with us! But if they were making great works like Picasso’s Guernica, it has sadly been lost to the mists of time…
[1] Clark A (2013) “Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36(3), 181-204 doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X12000477 ---- he also published some great general audience books on predictive coding, well worth a read!!!
[2] Vartanian O (2019) “Neuroscience of Creativity” (pp. 148-172, The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology:, edited by Kaufman JC & Sternberg RJ) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press doi.org/10.1017/9781316979839.010
[3] Hao W, Andolina IM, Wang W, & Zhang Z (2021) “Biologically Inspired Visual Computing: The State of the Art” Frontiers of Computer Science 15, 151304 doi.org/10.1007/s11704-020-9001-8
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Well, human brains use about as much power as a light bulb to do tasks that are out of reach for data centers consuming more power than entire cities. More generally, evolution has optimized human brains for efficiency and portability (able to fit inside our bodies and consume no more resources than are readily available with Paleolithic tools), while machine learning is optimized for accuracy. Almost all advances in AI since the 1980s are attributable to (1) bigger datasets and (2) the ability to throw more hardware at the problem. It seems reasonable to me that the different constraints would lead to different solutions.
(For more discussion along these lines, see C. Frenkel, D. Bol and G. Indiveri, “Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approaches for the Design of Neuromorphic Processing Systems: Tradeoffs and Synergies Between Natural and Artificial Intelligence,” in Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 111, no. 6, pp. 623-652, June 2023, doi: 10.1109/JPROC.2023.3273520.)
Many of the cave paintings and sculptures that have survived are impressive as art. And of course our appreciation of Guernica is filtered through the same millenia of culture experience that led to its creation: we don’t know what our Paleolithic ancestors would have thought about it.
(Edit to add: Also, our Paleolithic ancestors lacked experience with large scale war and especially aerial bombardment. Which, of course, were part of the inspiration for Guernica. I’m not sure we “win” that argument.)
Our earliest literature is of course much younger, dating only to the invention of writing, but Homer is still being read and appreciated and reinterpreted today.
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I don’t want to start getting into the weeds here, but the biggest tangible advance in AI, back-propagation and the resultant convolutional neural nets were just seed ideas in the late 80s. it was the persistence of Geoffrey Hinton, Lecun, Benigo and others who kept this idea moving forwards for the next two decades. DNNs of course piggy back on better access to data, and faster hardware, but there were significant conceptual shifts in how networks could be trained that allowed this. It is hard to underestimate that few academics in the 90s paid much attention to DNNs, by the 2010s DNNs just wiped the floor with alternatives. A single grad student could outperform decades of accumulated trad-AI progress. This was an accumulated conceptual algorithmic revolution for which Hinton, LeCun and Benigo won the Turing Award (there is some contention about original sources for these ideas).
Right, and even cooler is that our computing device runs on energy we literally harvest from the environment (don’t have enough power, eat a banana!). But again, the question is what happens as we apply inspiration from evolution, and start thinking about optimisation.
But as horrible as it is, the fact that we had built so many Empires and cities, had competing political ideologies, designed machines that could fly, bombs that could kill, are also cultural testaments to the beautiful tragedy of our accumulated abilities. My point exactly is that “our Paleolithic ancestors lacked experience” — knowledge accretes slowly over centuries, encoded in the synapses of each brain as it comes into the world to change the statistical millieu and propel our brain to do things that were literally unimaginable to our anatomically identical ancestors.
I gain as much satisfaction reading Aristotle as I do Galen Strawson. But we also can’t deny that thousands of years of human thought to date have opened possibilities that were probably unthinkable by Pythagoras, Anaxagoras and all the other great and creative minds around the dawn of written thought. Greeks mostly contemplated slavery as acceptable (with some Stoic exceptions), as did many other cultures at the time. They didn’t have the conceptual tools to explore the natural world as later natural scientists did, couldn’t really test the ideas that they did have.
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I’ve been working with an editor for five years on a project that’s taken me seven years. He’s survived two rehabs, and one triple heart bypass. But he’s finally gone AWOL, and I’m not waiting around for him. Professional editors are of no use to me now (he was a professional editor) because of my grammar, punctuation, and general idiosyncratic writing style (that he’d learned and was familiar with. it’s also over 180K words. After much research it looks like I’m going to do it myself with a combination of ProWritingAid and Grammarly. Frustrating. But if a company came along and made something like Scrivener, but with AI editing tools, I’d jump over there quicker than you could say: “Wow, you really jumped over there, didn’t you?”
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The upcoming Apple AI is system wide and will offer proofreading writing tools.
Perhaps it will suit your needs.
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I understand the Scrivener team’s reticence to integrating AI directly into the tool. To be honest, though, I don’t see the need to go to that extreme. There are a number of existing products that could very well be complementary to Scrivener - such as NovelCrafter - that can offer AI as part of their toolset.
I mentioned Scrivener to the NovelCrafter team on their forums and suggested a collaborative integration. Some tools are similar across the platforms, but I really feel like Scrivener keeps me organized so much better and reading / writing work better for me in Scrivener. NovelCrafter allows me to dive into what I’ve written and get feedback. I understand it’s fallible, but I’m not a published author and I’m not yet to the point where I need beta readers. I’m also on the spectrum and have difficulting crafting dialog that’s in the voice of my characters, though I’m learning and getting better at it!
Suffice to say that I do think the team’s approach to AI is understandable. I do wish that they would lean a bit more into making some type of sync tool that could be used as a connector for other services. Aeon Timeline has a great sync option for Scrivener, but it’d be nice to have the ability to connect into other tools as well.
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Good idea with the connector. I already use Grammarly for grammar, which works well. I could personally use AI to check up on my projects, such as “Did I mention XYZ before, as I have written here?” or “How long would this take to be read aloud?” and so on. Having ChatGPT, being able to access the project and ask it questions like that, would be a helpful tool, at least for me. But I understand the issues with implementing AI in general.
I find it hard to believe that many still think that Scrivener should not incorporate AI-driven tools, for me that’s absolutely a must. The increase in productivity is so obvious, and copying/pasting is no fun at all. Scrivener is not just used to write novels—although even for that purpose, IA could help in many ways. I am certainly not going to pay for a license upgrade if it does not include the integration with a tool like Grammarly, or similar. Scrivener has plenty of great functionality but this is a critical moment, and I encourage the team to embrace innovation with no hesitations. Just build it in a way that does not hamper workflows that do not require IA-based functionality. Easy integrations with open-end content management systems like Contentful would also be welcome, because at the moment Scrivener is too much of a walled garden. Digital products have evolved enormously in the past few years, it worries me that Scrivener is not catching up. I think the software needs a complete overhaul, to meet the needs of people like me who write products that are 100% digital in nature, and have to integrate in ways that go beyond industry standards such as those used for e-books.
I’m just curious, did you write this post or was it “AI”?
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It was written by IA.
Well, since it incorporates Grammarly quite seamlessly, I encourage you to submit an immediate upgrade fee to L&L.
I’m sure the developers will appreciate that bit if passive income.
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I don’t know if Scrivener should integrate AI, IA, II, AA, ahh. What’s really interesting here is something else. At a certain point, people who use software believe that they have a right to determine how the product develops. This takes on grotesque forms from time to time.
… whatever.
Well, of course that puts the developers under a lot of pressure. What is meant to be expressed here is not this threat. IT is the opposite … I am completely desperate, I absolutely want to use Scrivener … please, please, please implement everything I want. Otherwise my world is no longer worth living in.
After the hidden desperation comes the obligatory (technical) advice part … listen to me, I know exactly how an app must be and I’ll explain it to you now.
And finally, of course, the most important marketing argument… if you do what I say, you’ll not only keep me as a customer, you’ll win many, many more.
Which brings us back to the beginning. People like him think they have a right to decide what happens next. And what they decide is of course the best for everyone. It would never occur to them that they only have one right: They are allowed to buy a product if they like it.
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Well actually that’s quite inaccurate to say, AI has become excellent when it comes to corrections and improvements in grammar, tone of voice, etc., so it would have never allowed those ten lines of text to pass through as they are. As a matter of fact, those words were written in a rush and I must admit they are a bit sloppy—to be honest, I was aware of that but it was late in the evening and had no energy to make it more accurate. On top of that, the post editing functionality is not allowed on this forum, which I find very inconvenient. What mattered to me was to give my two cents, even if not expressed in the most accurate manner: it’s the content that matters and I expect people to read it and make meaningful comments if they have anything to say, rather than come up with cheap jokes that only make this thread longer to read. I am a busy person and have no desire to engage in discussions with people who have time to waste on unproductive discussions, and derogatory comments. We don’t know each other, be respectful. I am not your sister nor your beer buddy.
See reply above, the same applies to you. And if there’s any moderators on this forum, I encourage them to foster productive discussions, rather than giving free rein to the jokers the likes of yourself. This is the first time that I make a contribution on this forum and so far I’ve only received hostile comments that add unnecessary noise to this threat and are a waste of time for everybody.
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One question, though: Why doesn’t your “AI” insist on using paragraphs?
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What you’ve missed out is:
… because at the moment Scrivener is too much of a walled garden.
It just seems to me that one of the reasons Scrivener is so good is that it is a walled garden.
Back in the 1990s, there was for Mac Word 5.1a. It was terrific, to me the equal of any word processor today; I’d still be using it if I could. It ran happily on the comparatively tiny RAM and hard disk space that Macs had in those days. But then Microsoft started listening to focus groups and implementing any suggestion that came along, and the result was the bloated Word that exists today.
Scrivener has developed a lot and become much more powerful since it’s launch, but that development has been kept under control precisely because of the “walled garden” they have established. Members of the team have explained how and why integrating AI is not considered an option at the moment.
So, my personal view is, if you don’t like what you see in the walled garden, go and look for the other options that you say are out there. Or, if you say you’re a developer, how about developing it yourself?
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@xiamenese I don’t think you mean me, but the other one 