I think i disagree with the idea of “democratizing creativity” that the article is predicated on. Perhaps i am misunderstanding what is meant by this, but to my eyes they can be a tool within creativity processes, but they dont democratize creativity. I might be way off base here, so yk, read my words critically. I also have only read the first couple paragraphs, so again, read my words critically!

To my understanding of creativity, LLMs cannot democratize creativity because they remove/replace the creative process. If i want to create an image, and i prompt some software to make it for me, then i have not actually created anything. I have not been creative. It is functionally the same as asking someone else to draw a thing for me.

The article gives some examples tho:

They enable a nurse to visualize a protest poster, a factory worker to draft a union newsletter, or a tenant to simulate rent-strike scenarios.

The protest poster, the nurse must have already had an idea of the protest poster, what it should say, what it should look like, what it should communicate, something about it. Even ignoring the central issue of LLMs not actually understanding anything and just being a statistical association of tokens, the LLM doesnt aid in creativity; it serves as a place to outsource creativity to. The nurse may use its output in further creative processes, but that output itself is not the nurses creativity.

Given the starting point of the nurse first having ideas for the poster (a creative process) and then prompting the LLM (an outsourcing process), theres a few ways forward. One is to basically copy/paste it to the posterboard, such as through writing the output on the board. This is a mechanically creative process (the nurse has created a new physical thing) but is not an idea-ly creative process (the nurse has not created a new idea). Another is to take the output and modify it, adapt it, change it. This is not a mechanically creative process (no new thing has been created) but is an idealy creative process (new idea has been created/modified/etc). But to my eyes this latter scenario is comprised of two seperate creative processes and one outsourcing process. It can look like a single creative process, but really it is comprised of multiple processes (at least to my eyes and understanding). It is functionally the same as asking your friend to look things up for you on the internet, except because of how LLMs work youre getting back some mishmash of all the things the friend found instead of the things themselves.

As far as drafting a union newsletter and simulating rent strike scenarios, im not going to dig into it cause its the same argument as the protest poster, but the newsletter would be e.g. feeding recent union events into an LLM and asking it to summarize (again you have not been creative you have outsourced your creativity), and as far as simulating a rent strike, well, try asking an LLM to be a GM to see how well simulations work. LLMs are statistical models, they are not capable of reason or logic. The appearance of such is due to the statistical associations resembling logic, not an underlying “p→q” logical process.

Basically to my eyes LLMs are a tool that can be utilized as a part of an overarching creative process composed of subprocesses but are not themselves creative. The purpose of creativity is to be creative! Thats not to say that nothing that touches an LLM is creative, but rather that the LLM use is an outsourcing of parts of the creative processes.