Why AI struggles to create original ideas
AI predicts the likely next thing, which makes it an optimization tool. Calvin Ross Carl on why it can’t give you a truly new idea.
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl points out that a lot of people now use AI to generate ideas and brainstorm, and reminds them what the technology actually is. AI is an optimization technology whose whole job is to predict the statistically likely next thing. That makes it impressive, but it also means every answer is built from prior data and prior best practices. What comes back is an extrapolation of what you fed it, never a truly new idea.
Highlights
- AI as a whole is an optimization technology.
- Its job is to predict the statistically likely next thing.
- Predictions built on prior data can’t produce a truly new idea.
Key insights
Prediction isn’t invention
A tool that predicts the likely next thing is, by design, pulling toward the expected. Original ideas live in the unlikely.
Built from the past
AI bases its output on prior data and prior best practices, so at best it extends what already exists.
Detailed analysis
This ties AI directly to Calvin’s larger argument about optimization and innovation. If optimization is about making the known more efficient, AI is optimization in its purest form. Using it to brainstorm asks an optimization tool to do innovation’s job, which is why the ideas it returns feel familiar.
Conclusion
Use AI where it helps, but don’t expect a prediction engine to hand you something nobody has imagined.
A lot of folks are using AI for generating ideas and brainstorming, but it is worth remembering that AI as a whole is an optimization technology. That is what it is. Its whole job is to predict the likely next thing statistically. That is its actual job. It’s incredible how it works, but if you’re always predicting what is statistically likely, you’re only basing it off of prior data, prior best practices, all of that stuff. So you’re never really getting a truly new, innovative idea. It’s just an extrapolation of what you’ve fed it.