Does ChatGPT have an imagination?

For several weeks, everyone has been able to test the new capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) with the release of ChatGPT, this machine capable of responding to our most complex queries. We’ve seen teachers shudder at this tool that can produce dissertations worthy of good students, so SciencesPo has banned its use. More broadly, it’s the fear that people will be attracted to the car that has made a comeback. Because AI is no longer content with simulating our intelligence and its computations at speeds and volumes of data that exceed our understanding. Now he could imagine. If machines begin to imagine, what is left for humans?

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The end of human imagination.

ChatGPT is really capable of writing poems in the manner of Baudelaire or inventing fiction in the style of Tolkien. Another program, DALL-E, creates tables following our instructions, from simplest to most eccentric. DeepDream lets you create hallucinatory images beyond what you thought you could imagine. Hence this question arises. Does the advent of this artificial and externalized imagination mark the end of the human imagination?

Man-made database

In fact, the pictures and poems produced by AI impress us, but remain of rather average quality. DeepDream’s images are intriguing, unreal, but they don’t really move us. To understand this, it is necessary to distinguish between creative imagination. If the machine is able to create works of art and artistic creations, then this artificial production of images is not identical in all respects to our imagination. Imitation of our human abilities is certainly powerful, but depends on a human-made database.

More freedom

Moreover, the creativity of these images is the result of statistical associations, possibly random, while a person is free to use his imagination and falsify statistics without the obvious risk of doing so. In addition to being free, our imaginations are infused with our lived experiences, our history, our memories, and our upbringing.

A disturbing quirk

They are never simple colored shapes that we can encode. What the machine lacks at the moment to really move us, to make the craft disappear, is not just a body with its experience, but a way of life shared with us. Otherwise, these artificial productions are inevitably accompanied by a disturbing strangeness.

This is not the end of imagination, but it must be reinvented if we are to think about a future that is not just the realization of our past imaginations.

Aurelien Robert

A technological acceleration that begs the question

The anxiety that drives science fiction is based on crossing these boundaries when we imagine free and conscious machines that can interact with us like humans. We are not there. But our concern is heightened by technological acceleration, which paradoxically puts limits on our imaginations as the gap between science fiction and reality shrinks. Therefore, it is not the end of imagination, but we will have to reinvent it if we want to think about a future that is not just the realization of our past imaginations.

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