Is A.I. Actually Creative? Are We?
About this episode
The episode uses animal minds and artificial intelligence to ask what creativity and intelligence really are. Tchaikovsky, the science-fiction author of Children of Time, Children of Ruin and Children of Memory, imagines advanced spider, octopus and corvid civilizations — spiders perceiving through vibration and webs, octopuses thinking through distributed bodies, corvids solving problems collectively — as exercises in empathy with radically nonhuman sensoriums. His newest novel asks whether sophisticated problem-solving implies sapience, a question he parallels with large language models. The conversation turns to AI-generated text and images: Tchaikovsky worries that automated abundance could displace working creators, while Klein and Tchaikovsky debate whether machine output can be creative when it lacks intention, meaning and dialogue with an audience. They conclude that genuine communication is hard even between humans, and that imagining other minds remains a moral act.