Why AI Can’t Make Human Creativity Obsolete
Recent history gives us a powerful and definitive reason for hope
By the year 2000 people worried that professional chess was doomed.
Who would prefer inferior human games when IBM’s Deep Blue could beat then-world champion Garry Kasparov? Machines would get better and better: if they could already outmatch the best humans, what was the point? We would surely just sit there, in awe, admiring chess-playing machines transcend beyond comprehension.
It didn’t happen.
Machines got better, true, but humans kept playing. And we kept watching other humans play. Perhaps it was because chess engines like Deep Blue, or its modern version, Stockfish, are too inhuman. They are strong players but cold and calculative. The spark of genius can’t be codified, which results in a lack of insight and inventiveness. That’s a turnoff.
Circa 2020. This time was different — surely no one will ever watch another human chess match now that AIs play not just better than the best humans but the likes of AlphaZero do it in an uncannily similar creative way. As the NYT put it, AlphaZero “played … intuitively and beautifully, with a romantic, attacking style.” What’s left for humans to offer?
