Somewhere in the dark recesses of workshop memories is a creativity exercise where I was asked to think of all the uses for a paperclip. What starts with the obvious quickly develops into the outlandish and the realisation that a paperclip can be used for pretty much anything with enough imagination.

I thought about that exercise while reading Kevin Kelly this week on latent space, the most creative and useful description of an LLM I have come across. He describes a map built not in two dimensions but in billions of dimensions, where every concept is a direction. Push a shoe toward appleness. Ask what history would look like if the Romans had discovered gunpowder. Brian Eno once complained that computers did not have enough Africa in them; in latent space, Africa is a direction you can add to anything.

What stuck with me was him saying "the words are the thinking". An LLM does not look up an answer, it travels toward one along multi-dimensional paths. What we have built is a stream of consciousness we can steer.

Kelly even predicts the nostalgia: one day kids will revisit today's models for their weird hallucinations the way we prize the crackle of vinyl.

Musicians and authors are mourning the lunch AI is about to steal. My challenge to them: you are not thinking big enough. In Sebastian Mallaby's biography of Demis Hassabis, The Infinity Machine, Hassabis adds a neuroscience PhD to his computer science because the problems he wants to solve, consciousness among them, are too big for a human mind alone. Solve intelligence, then use it to solve everything else.

That is the right scale of ambition. The paperclip stretched imagination against its own limits. We now have a machine for making connections no workshop could reach, and the critical path has moved from the tools to us.

AI is not a threat to creativity; it is the biggest invitation creativity has ever received.

So the question worth asking: now that the connections come almost free, how much more creative are we prepared to be?

Latent Space as a New Medium — Kevin Kelly, The Technium

Related on this site:
Why AI Needs Your Imagination — AI is an imagination challenge, not a technology one - the paperclip exercise included.
The future of creativity — Four scenarios for where creativity goes next, built with the Creative Mornings team.