As far as I can tell, I think you are interchanging the ability to recognize creativity with the ability to be creative. Humans seem to have the ability to make creative works or ideas that are not entirely derivative from a given data set or fit the criteria of some pre-existing pattern.
That is why I mentioned Kuhn and paradigm shifts. The architecture of LLMs do not seem capable of making lateral moves or sublations that are by definition not derivative or reducible to its prior circumstance, yet humans do, even though the exact way we do so is pretty mysterious and wrapped up in the difficulties in understanding consciousness.
To claim LLMs can or will equal human creativity seems to imply we can clearly define not only what creativity is, but also consciousness and also how to make a machine that can somehow do both. Humans can be creative prima facie, but to think we can also make a computer do the same thing probably means you have an inadequate definition of creativity.
I wrote a long response wrt. Kuhn under your earlier comment, but to summarize it here: I believe LLMs can make lateral moves, but they will find it hard to increment on them. That is, they can make a paradigm-shifting creative leap itself, but they can't then unlearn the old paradigm on the spot - their fixed training is an attractor that'll keep pulling them back.
As for:
> As far as I can tell, I think you are interchanging the ability to recognize creativity with the ability to be creative.
I kind of am, because I believe that the two are intertwined. I.e. "creativity" isn't merely an ability to make large conceptual leaps, or "lateral moves" - it's the ability to make a subset of those moves that will be recognized by others as creative, as opposed to recognized as wrong, or recognized as insane, or recognized as incomprehensible.
This might apply more to art than science, since the former is a moving target - art is ultimately about matching subjective perceptions of people, where science is about matching objective reality. A "too creative" leap in science can still be recognized as "creative" later if it's actually correct. With art, whether "too creative" will be eventually accepted or forever considered absurd, is unpredictable. Which is to say, maybe we should not treat these two types of "creativity" as the same thing in the first place.
That is why I mentioned Kuhn and paradigm shifts. The architecture of LLMs do not seem capable of making lateral moves or sublations that are by definition not derivative or reducible to its prior circumstance, yet humans do, even though the exact way we do so is pretty mysterious and wrapped up in the difficulties in understanding consciousness.
To claim LLMs can or will equal human creativity seems to imply we can clearly define not only what creativity is, but also consciousness and also how to make a machine that can somehow do both. Humans can be creative prima facie, but to think we can also make a computer do the same thing probably means you have an inadequate definition of creativity.