Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

> Well, that's a whataboutism, and doesn't detract from the fact that creative does not exist in the AI sphere.

Pointing out that your working definition excludes reality isn't whataboutism, it's pointing out an isolated demand for rigor.

If you cannot clearly articulate how human creativity (the only other type of creativity that exists) is not impugned by the definition you're using as evidence that creativity "does not exist in the AI sphere", you're not arguing from a place of knowledge. Your assertion is just as much sophistry as the people who assert it is creativity. Unlike them, however, you're having to argue against instances where it does appear creative.

For my own two cents, I don't claim to fully understand how human creativity emerges, but I am confident that all human creative works rest heavily on a foundation of the synthesis of author's previous experiences, both personal and of others' creative works - and often more heavily the latter. If your justification for a lack of creativity is that LLMs are merely synthesizing from previous works, then your argument falls flat.

Agreed.

"Whataboutism" is generally used to describe a more specific way of pointing out an isolated demand for rigor—specifically, answering an accusation of immoral misconduct with an accusation that the accuser is guilty of similar immoral misconduct. More broadly, "whataboutism" is a term for demands that morality be judged justly, by objective standards that apply equally to everyone, rather than by especially rigorous standards for a certain person or group. As with epistemic rigor, the great difficulty with inconsistent standards is that we can easily fall into the trap of applying unachievable standards to someone or some idea that we don't like.

So it makes some sense to use the term "whataboutism" for pointing out an isolated demand for rigor in the epistemic space. It's a correct identification of the same self-serving cognitive bias that "whataboutism" targets in the space of ethical reasoning, just in a different sphere.

There's the rhetorical problem that "whataboutism" is a derogatory term for demanding that everyone be judged by the same standards. Ultimately that makes it unpersuasive and even counterproductive, much like attacking someone with a racial slur—even if factually accurate, as long as the audience isn't racist, the racial slur serves only to tar the speaker with the taint of racism, rather than prejudicing the audience against its nominal target.

In this specific case, if you concede that humans are no more creative than AIs, then it logically follows that either AIs are creative to some degree, or humans are not creative at all. To maintain the second, you must adopt a definition of "creativity" demanding enough to exclude all human activity, which is not in keeping with any established use of the term; you're using a private definition, greatly limiting the usefulness of your reasoning to others.

And that is true even if the consequences of AIs being creative would be appalling.

> Hell, I just rewrote the previous sentence to use the passive voice

Well, sort of. You used the passive voice, but you didn't use it on any finite verbs, placing your example well outside the scope of the normal "don't use the passive voice" advice.

Usually the passive voice is used at work to emphasize that it was a team/consensus decision, adjacent to the blameless incident management culture. It’s not important that one engineer or PM pushed it, but that ultimately the decision was aligned on and people should be aware.

Although arguably it would be clearer with the active voice and which specific teams / level of leadership aligned on it, usually in the active voice people just use the royal “we” instead for this purpose which doesn’t add any clarity.

Alternatively sometimes I don’t know exactly who made the decision, I just learned it from an old commit summary. So in that case too it’s just important that some people at some time made the decision, hopefully got the right approvals, and here we are.

And LLMs started to tell pepl what to do :DDD.