AI consumes huge amounts of energy, but still can’t beat humans on creativity.
The Winter Olympics have just wrapped up, but the AI vs. human contest is just getting started. Lots of people are stressed out right now trying to predict the impacts AI will have on markets, energy, white-collar work, and the whole global economy.
I don’t have the answers, but I do suspect that for humans, leaning into our humanness will be important.
So in the spirit of Olympic joyfulness (thanks Alysa Liu!), I decided to stage a ‘creativity qualifying round’ between AI and humans: light bulb painting.
To represent humanity, I chose some awesome seventh graders in Vietnam who painted lightbulbs in their art class a few years ago. I found these while searching online for light bulb images, loved them, and asked the teacher if I could use them (she said yes).
The original prompt from the teacher was this: ‘Do a drawing or animation unit on the inside of a light bulb. For the inside of your light bulb. look at Surrealism, Surrealist collages and Realism. The only requirement is accurate toning on the bottom of the lightbulb.’
Here’s some of the lightbulbs the seventh graders created:
Now here’s some lightbulbs created by the AIs, with a similar prompt. Never mind which models I used – they’re changing so fast, that’s noise right now. Instead, let’s just look at their output.
The first batch came out heavy on sci-fi and fantasy (blecch):
Followed by some less dystopian, more surreal ones:
Now back to the seventh graders. Here’s some more of their bulbs:
As a final test, I showed the AIs the seventh graders’ bulbs (I hadn’t up til this point). Asked to create something just as creative, one AI model went for an almost exact copy of the human format:
While another chose to paint the outside of some bulbs (interesting idea, really weak execution):
So who won… AI or the kids?
A few of the AI bulbs were impressive, as was the AI models’ occasional attempts to document their design process:
But frankly I found most of the AI bulbs to be boring and derivative.
The seventh grader bulbs, by contrast, were much more alive, joyful, and provocative.
They were also less perfect (a plus), and more likely to tell a story. Like this one:
So I’m calling this qualifying event for the seventh graders.
May our human advantage over machines last forever… or at least til the next Winter Olympics!
P.S. To see the final animations some of the seventh graders made with their drawings, watch this YouTube video:
