Distinguish the Imitation from Creation to Stay Ahead of the Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI)

I use ChatGPT daily; it’s an astonishing search engine, but don’t say it’s creative, and let me show you why

Generated with DALL-E. Prompt: ‘An impressionist oil painting of two young men discussing the difference between imitation and creativity. The imitation is represented by a mirror, while the creativity by a spark.’

Let’s step back from the WOW effect ChatGPT and similar software have induced into our minds from the end of 2022 onward. Emotions like wonder and amazement often prevent us from understanding things beyond the surface.

The fact is that Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) is software. Given an input, GAI returns — hopefully — the expected output.

If you want to stay ahead of GAI, always remember that it has the exact nature of Microsoft Excel — that is just an example — even though GAI implements a dramatically different model, which aims to imitate how humans receive the input and give the output.

Regardless of the complexity of the model it implements, software remains what Wikipedia says:

Software is a collection of programs and data that tell a computer how to perform specific tasks.

Remember it, and you’re ready to go deeper inside the topic: imitation isn’t creation. Let’s start with a sad tale of a man who seemed like GAI.