Even for all its tragedies, the war in Ukraine doesn’t come remotely close to the horrors of the great wars of the 20th century, neither in its scale, nor in the method in which it is conducted.

Both Vietnam and the Korean War had millions of civilian deaths. Millions. Ukraine will have several tens of thousands by the time it’s done. Horrendous but… still very small in comparison.

And that’s not even talking about the methods. The Nazis were obviously monsters, but even looking at the Allies - the indiscriminate bombing civilian targets to oblivion was not only not as controversial as today but the standard practice. Killing hundreds upon hundreds of thousands.

Nowadays, when we talk about civilian bombing, it’s generally about infrastructure being destroyed and whether the collateral was acceptable or not. No one wants to be seen as targeting civilians and comparatively, the deaths among them remain low.

Neither do humans. People didn't suddenly produce great art work, from the flat medieval art to the quality we saw to the great renaissance art took centuries, generations of arrtists buiilding on each others small innovations. I think your expectations exceed what people are capable of.

The point I’m trying to make is that this evolving code part is capable of creativity, or at least a very good imitation of it.

That’s the main thing distinguishing old chess/go bots from the new generation, which has become way, way stronger. The old bots essentially just did depth searches and then evaluated positions based on spoon fed human knowledge. This was a big hurdle for Go bots in particular, because depth searches are extremely computationally difficult with a board that large.

The new generation instead, plays millions of games against itself. It randomly changes its strategies over time. If it wins, it tells itself, “hey I won! Maybe that is worth remembering”, slightly changes it’s code accordingly and continues building from there.

These type of bots are capable of coming up with completely new strategies on their own. Again - not just through search trees, that’s completely infeasible for a game like go - but by modifying its own code incrementally until it knows how to play the game. And similar things can happen here, even to a lesser degree. Go/chess have the advantage of having very clear outlines of what “good” is - if you win the game, good, have your cookies continue just like that, sport. For essays etc… it’s a bit more vague - the best we have is user feedback, and you need some separate intelligent code to generate “feedback” on its own. But in this manner, it does something that is, imo, akin to “creativity”

It’s not just making trees. That’s part of it, sure, but a big part of it is artificial neural networks (don’t mind the name, I don’t like it either) with feedback loops. You can think of it as a more efficient form of evolution - random modifications in its behavior that leads to changes in outcome, behavior that is then either encouraged or discouraged based on feedback (based on human input and if it’s well made, on self-testing). That’s part of the code. And that type of code is capable of creating new things, new solutions.

What would “reasoning” look like, to you? What more is there to reasoning than building appropriate chains of connections? That’s generally how logic argumentation works. And as said, it builds them very coherently.

It is. Like, you can ask it for essays about extremely obsucure topics that likely no one ever wrote an essay on. Specify a length. Even on abstract topics - (whether some character from a not all too well known show is inherently evil or not). It’ll produce you a coherent answer, mention all the relevant scenes, you can adjust what position you want it to take or how long you want the essay to be etc…

What it’s strongest at currently, is the ability to tie ideas together - for example, scenes from a show and concepts (such as “inherently evil”). Hence why it’s particularly good at essays.

Chatgpt has the ability to connect concepts (which is what makes it great at essays). It probably has some knowledge about poker, some knowledge about meerkats, and connects the two in a manner that is normal for human joke form.

You can ask it some pretty obscure things actually, for which you can be fairly sure that no prior content exists, and it’s still able to create new material. It’s not just regurgitating material.

Especially good at essays. Can make an essay about why x from your favorite anime is inherently evil or not, for example, choose a length, it’ll give you a coherent essay of approximately that length. It’s absolutely capable of connecting ideas (concepts and scenes from a show to the idea of “inherently evil”, for example - or in this case likely, something that it knows about meerkats to something it knows about poker- and connect the two in a manner that is normal for a joke based on its training.)

Just gmail works

“ At this point AI can only be trained on existing data, its not creating novel nueral connections that could result in original thought.”

Ah… no

AI also learns on feedback loop, and randomizes. So - it fosters a sense of what is “good”, based on feedback loop, and can create new things based on that feedback loop.