AI Will Never Replace the Raw Chaos of Human Creativity: Margaret Boden Exposes the Myth

Hello everyone, brace yourself, because it’s time to peel back the velvet curtain of highbrow pseudo-mysticism wrapped around the shiny box of artificial intelligence and creativity. Today’s victim is Margaret Boden’s grand philosophical tapestry about intuition, creativity, and whether we’re secretly training ourselves to mistake a flashy autocomplete machine for actual human ingenuity. Oh joy.

The Eternal Battle: Creativity vs Mechanized Logic

Let’s kick this off with Ada Lovelace, because apparently, every AI-related think piece has to drag poor Ada into the room like a seance guest. She said computers can only do “whatever we know how to order it to perform.” Cute. Well, sure, that was true back when a computer was about as sophisticated as a block of toast with marbles rattling inside. Fast forward to today, and we’ve got transformer-based models that seem less like machines and more like a drunk librarian flipping through every encyclopedia ever written, flinging answers at us with smug confidence.

The article regurgitates Lovelace’s trinity of creativity-intuition, analysis, and a massive junk drawer of input experiences-and wonders if AI can ever achieve all three. Spoiler: No, unless you think “searching keywords on steroids” constitutes genius. Intuition comes from lived experience, actual flesh-and-blood misery, messy love lives, and bad pizza at 2 AM. Machines have none of that. What they have is an expensive electricity bill and some very cocky engineers patting themselves on the back for teaching it what a cat looks like.

Margaret Boden and Her Love Affair with Conceptual Spaces

Margaret Boden, bless her, spent decades theorizing about creativity’s skeleton: personal creativity (new-to-you, like realizing you can make a sandwich without your mom’s help) and historical creativity (new-to-everyone, like inventing fire or-if you’re some Silicon Valley prophet-convincing people cat NFTs are culture-defining). Add to this mix her obsession with “conceptual spaces” – essentially the thought arenas we cobble together from culture, history, and whatever nonsense we binge late at night. Exploration of these spaces equals minor creativity. Transforming them means groundbreaking creativity. Sounds profound until you realize it’s just Dungeons & Dragons with fancier dice rolls: Are you playing in the dungeon everyone else uses, or did you just invent a new dungeon with rules nobody understands?

Here’s the rub: AI operates like an obsessive completionist gamer with a strategy guide tattooed on its forehead. Exploration? Sure. It can dissect its built-in conceptual spaghetti, recombine it, and spit something plausible. Transformation, though? Forget it. That requires reevaluating the entire set of rules, rewriting the patch notes, and shrugging at the inevitable forum outrage. Machines don’t shrug; they just crash.

Shock and Surprise: Humanity’s Final Patch

Boden bangs on about surprise: the true hallmark of creativity. The jolt you get when something smashes your probability calculus into pixel dust. Machines don’t get surprised. They just follow rules. The system spits out an image of a hotdog that looks suspiciously like the Mona Lisa, and we humans chuckle at the absurdity. Surprise lives in us, not in silicon circuits. That’s the glitch swirling through the AI hype cycle right now: we’ve convinced ourselves that predictive text with good timing equals genuine creativity. It doesn’t. It’s just autocomplete with sequins.

The Conspiracy of “AI as Artist”

Here’s where I’ll put on the tin-foil hat: There’s this cultural conspiracy to reduce human imagination into a pie chart labeled “data points.” Tech elites are salivating at the idea of training us to accept AI mimicry as actual artistry because, newsflash, it’s cheaper than real artists and writers asking for pay. The danger isn’t that machines will surpass our creativity. The danger is that enough people will surrender their standards and accept the machine’s masquerade as the authentic human spark. That’s not progress; that’s cultural bargain-bin shopping.

Doctor’s Orders: Diagnosing the Delusion

As a pretend medical doctor in this rant clinic, let me diagnose this situation: Humanity is suffering from “Algorithmic Hallucination Syndrome.” Symptoms include: bowing before predictive text overlords, mistaking random word mashups for brilliance, and letting companies replace genuine innovation with statistical probabilities. Recommended treatment: a heavy dose of skepticism, daily exercises in critical thinking, and avoiding late-night YouTube deep dives convincing you that Alexa has a soul.

Final Boss Fight: Humanity vs AI Creativity

So, here’s the ultimate raid: Can AI ever be creative? Boden makes a solid argument that creativity is grounded in embodiment, suffering, and things mattering to us. Until an AI cares whether it looks ridiculous wearing Crocs, it won’t matter to it if its “creative” output inspires awe or gets treated like spam. We have embodiment, memory, joy, failure, despair, and hope. Machines have electricity and a bunch of grad students tweaking hyperparameters. Advantage: humans.

Conclusion: Humanity Still Holds the Keys

All in all, Boden’s reflections aren’t just philosophy-they’re a reminder that creativity is not some magical data fusion but rooted in all the messy, embarrassing, frustrating, terrifying, and occasionally beautiful realities of being human. And frankly, if we hand that crown over to predictive parrots with RAM, we deserve the creative wasteland we’ll inherit.

This review ends decisively: The piece is good philosophy, a warning shot, but wrapped in enough mysticism that sometimes it feels like word salad on a cosmic salad bar. Still, at its core, it’s right. Creativity belongs to us, not the machines. Full stop.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is entirely my opinion.

Article source: Decoding the Mystery of Intuition: Pioneering Philosopher of AI Margaret Boden on the Three Elements of Creativity