On the stochastics of human and artificial creativity

Abstract: What constitutes human creativity, and is it possible for computers to exhibit genuine creativity? We argue that achieving human-level intelligence in computers, or so-called Artificial General Intelligence, necessitates attaining also human-level creativity. We contribute to this discussion by developing a statistical representation of human creativity, incorporating prior insights from stochastic theory, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and chaos theory. This highlights the stochastic nature of the human creative process, which includes both a bias guided, random proposal step, and an evaluation step depending on a flexible or transformable bias structure. The acquired representation of human creativity is subsequently used to assess the creativity levels of various contemporary AI systems. Our analysis includes modern AI algorithms such as reinforcement learning, diffusion models, and LLMs, addressing to what extent they measure up to human level creativity. We conclude that these technologies currently lack the capability for autonomous creative action at a human level.