AI will never replace good old human creativity

This isn’t the first invention by AI – machines have produced innovations ranging from scientific papers and books to new materials and music.That said, being creative is clearly one of the most remarkable human traits. In principle, this is also something that can be done by machines – in fact, they excel at storing, processing, and making connections within data.Machines come up with innovations by using generative methods. These generated pictures come extremely close to real people.But even if machines can create innovations from data, this does not mean that they are likely to steal all the spark of human creativity any time soon. As such latent needs are hard to formulate and make explicit, they are also unlikely to find their way into the data pool that machines need for innovation.Humans and machines also have different raw materials that they use as input for innovation. Humans, however, can empathize with other humans and understand their needs better.Finally, creative ideas generated by AI may be less preferred by consumers simply because they have been created by a machine. AI could become much more creative if it could combine big, rich, and otherwise disconnected data.Also, machines may get better at creativity when they get better at the kind of broad intelligence humans possess – something we call “general intelligence.” And this might not be too far in the future – some experts assess that there is a 50% chance that machines reach human-level intelligence within the next 50 years.This article is republished from The Conversation by Tim Schweisfurth, Associate Professor for Technology and Innovation Management, University of Southern Denmark and René Chester Goduscheit, Professor of Technology and Innovation Studies, Aarhus University under a Creative Commons license.