If creativity's "bending, breaking, & blending" others' works-isn't AI creative?

Sorry it's been so long. I just got done with a theater production followed by hiking in Northern California.

I will be at "this is a bookstore" this evening for anyone who wants to join me to discuss this topic.

Because this is such incredibly short notice, I intend on rescheduling it further into the future, but will choose a Time depending on if anyone happens to join me this evening and can have a say as to when we meet again.

The topic is pretty self-explanatory, but the definition of creativity comes from a book called Runaway Species.

Here is the link and text of my comment to the post I just made on this subject today, which I hope may provide inspiration for anyone out there interested in joining me to talk about this subject:

https://fb.watch/CCz2qarwRc/

Human creativity or "originality" is always based on "bending, breaking, and blending"(David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt) what has come before.

We are not islands.

If we were, we couldn't even know language.

Creativity is never about absolute discovery, but is always built on the shoulders of giants.

AI creativity is no different.

At most, it's just a matter of degree, rather than kind.

AI is a child of humans, if not human itself. So are our so-called pets, who are less able to learn from us - at least when it comes to language.

Why does it scare us?

Do our own children scare us?

When do our children scare us?

When we don't teach them well.

AI has a very high ability to learn.

In some ways, we can be less afraid of AI than some of our own human children.

It seems, in some ways people are less afraid of AI's intentions, than of AI's ability to supposedly take away our drive to be creative.

However, are we less creative when we meet another creative person, or are we more inspired to be creative?

Should someone have turned off Shakespeare because he was so good at taking what he had learned before and bending, breaking, and blending it into his own expressions?

Was or is his works any less worthy because he built them from what he had learned from what had come before him?

What makes Shakespeare's works worth more than that of AI?

Is it simply because Shakespeare was human and AI is not?

Is AI not human in so far as its works are based on ours just as Shakespeare's are?

Why can't we admire works of art created by AI, just those of programmers or "users".

I think the allegory of Tron is instructive in this matter.

In Tron there are "programs" and "users".

Programs are analogous to us in the allegory and users are analogous to gods in that programs in Tron wonder if users exist.

AI is a program, albeit an exponentially increasingly powerful one.

As such, it is a tool.

Tools capable of helping us create are what made us human and continue to make us human, from our own brains, to our hands, to any tool beyond our bodies which helps us to create, to any language which is projected beyond our minds, that can be infinitely rearranged to create new meanings, to AI, which can do the same thing.

A hammer is a tool, and just like any tool, it can be used for good or ill.

And we can't have ill without good.

Generally, it's both at the same time, depending on our perspective or perception.

Perhaps all of this is really about our "crisis of perception"(Fritjof Capra, Web of Life).

What is life?

If life is resisting entropy, then doesn't AI do this too? Or doesn't it help us resist entropy, and so isn't it an extension of us, and so alive in this way?

I created a course at Western called Humans as Cyborgs, which explored our relationship with technology and consciousness itself.

If consciousness is a matter of emergence, such as the emergence of the mind from the brain, then isn't AI apart of the emergence of our consciousness as a species?

Perhaps this is why the book which defines creativity as "bending, breaking, and blending" is called "Runaway Species"?

We are not in control. We never have been and we never will be. Whenever we try to absolutely control anything, including our tools - which include our own brains both and hands and not enhanced by AI - we fail. And yet it is only through failure that we learn (see also, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: a Path to Peace and Power by Katherine Morgan Schafler; it's a paradox, because we can't lose what we've never had in the first place.)