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DW
3 days ago
- Science
- DW
AI art can't match human creativity, yet — researchers – DW – 06/11/2025
Generative AI models are bad at representing things that require human senses, like smell and touch. Their creativity is 'hollow and shallow,' say experts. Anyone can sit down with an artificial intelligence (AI) program, such as ChatGPT, to write a poem, a children's story, or a screenplay. It's uncanny: the results can seem quite "human" at first glance. But don't expect anything with much depth or sensory "richness", as researchers explain in a new study. They found that the Large Language Modes (LLMs) that currently power Generative AI tools are unable to represent the concept of a flower in the same way that humans do. In fact, the researchers suggest that LLMs aren't very good at representing any 'thing' that has a sensory or motor component — because they lack a body and any organic human experience. "A large language model can't smell a rose, touch the petals of a daisy or walk through a field of wildflowers. Without those sensory and motor experiences, it can't truly represent what a flower is in all its richness. The same is true of some other human concepts," said Qihui Xu, lead author of the study at Ohio State University, US. The study suggests that AI's poor ability to represent sensory concepts like flowers might also explain why they lack human-style creativity. "AI doesn't have rich sensory experiences, which is why AI frequently produces things that satisfy a kind of minimal definition of creativity, but it's hollow and shallow," said Mark Runco, a cognitive scientist at Southern Oregon University, US, who was not involved in the study. The study was published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour , June 4, 2025. What are the challenges to book preservation? To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video AI poor at representing sensory concepts The more scientists probe the inner workings of AI models, the more they are finding just how different their 'thinking' is compared to that of humans. Some say AIs are so different that they are more like alien forms of intelligence. Yet objectively testing the conceptual understanding of AI is tricky. If computer scientists open up a LLM and look inside, they won't necessarily understand what the millions of numbers changing every second really mean. Xu and colleagues aimed to test how well LLMs can 'understand' things based on sensory characteristics. They did this by testing how well LLMs represent words with complex sensory meanings, measuring factors, such as how emotionally arousing a thing is or whether you can mentally visualize a thing, and movement or action-based representations. For example, they analyzed the extent to which humans experience flowers by smelling, or experience them using actions from the torso, such as reaching out to touch a petal. These ideas are easy for us to grasp, since we have intimate knowledge of our noses and bodies, but it's harder for LLMs, which lack a body. Overall, LLMs represent words well — but those words lack any connection to the senses or motor actions that we experience or feel as humans. But when it comes to words that have connections to things we see, taste or interact with using our body, that's where AI fails to convincingly capture human concepts. What's meant by 'AI art is hollow' AI creates representations of concepts and words by analyzing patterns from a dataset that is used to train it. This idea underlies every algorithm or task, from writing a poem, to predicting whether an image of a face is you or your neighbor. Most LLMs are trained on text data scraped from the internet, but some LLMs are also trained on visual learning, from still-images and videos. Xu and colleagues found that LLMs with visual learning exhibited some similarity with human representations in visual-related dimensions. Those LLMs beat other LLMs trained just on text. But this test was limited to visual learning — it excluded other human sensations, like touch or hearing. This suggests that the more sensory information an AI model receives as training data, the better it can represent sensory aspects. AI's impact on the working world To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video AI keeps learning and improving The authors noted that LLMs are continually improving and said it was likely that AI will get better at capturing human concepts in the future. Xu said that when future LLMs are augmented with sensor data and robotics, they may be able to actively make inferences about and act upon the physical world. But independent experts DW spoke to suggested the future of sensory AI remained unclear. "It's possible an AI trained on multisensory information could deal with multimodal sensory aspects without any problem," said Mirco Musolesi, a computer scientist at University College London, UK, who was not involved in the study. However, Runco said even with more advanced sensory capabilities, AI will still understand things like flowers completely differently to humans. Our human experience and memory are tightly linked with our senses — it's a brain-body interaction that stretches beyond the moment. The smell of a rose or the silky feel of its petals, for example, can trigger joyous memories of your childhood or lustful excitement in adulthood. AI programs do not have a body, memories or a 'self'. They lack the ability to experience the world or interact with it as animals and human-animals do — which, said Runco, means "the creative output of AI will still be hollow and shallow." Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘I want to change the film industry'
Nika Bartoo-SmithUnderscore Native News + ICT Editor's note: This story is the latest installment in our Youth Profiles series. You can read past stories in the series here, and stay tuned for more in the future. Trekking through the woods by her apartment in late March, Kazsia Connelly reminisced about making a zombie short film a few years prior, using this very forest as a backdrop for the movie, which a classmate wrote and directed and Connelly starred in for a media production class in high school. Connelly, 18, grew up in Willamina, Oregon, a small town of under 2,500, just minutes down the road from Grand Ronde. In January, she started at Southern Oregon University in Ashland and plans to pursue a degree in digital cinema. Passionate about film and Indigenous representation, Connelly hopes that the characters she plans to play on screen and the short films she dreams of writing will be able to help break down stereotypes and inspire other young Indigenous kids. Crawling over fallen branches and avoiding the stinging nettle plants littering the ground of the mossy forest, Connelly, a citizen of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, reflected on her dreams of becoming an actress. 'Especially as an Indigenous person, I was scared at first,' Connelly said, describing the toxicity she hears of in Hollywood. 'I want to change the film industry.' Her dream role would be to play Korra, the main character in the animated series 'The Legend of Korra,' a spinoff from the popular show 'Avatar: The Last Airbender.' In 2024, Netflix released a live-action version of 'Avatar: The Last Airbender.' Connelly loved the series and felt particularly inspired by the Indigenous woman who played the character Katara, a young Mohawk actress named Kiawentiio. 'One of the main reasons why I'm an actor is because I'm an Indigenous woman, and there's not lots of Indigenous people in films or TV shows or media in general,' Connelly said. 'I remember when I was a kid, whenever I saw a person of color [on screen], I was like, 'That's so cool. That's me.'' Connelly remembers many summers spent at the annual powwow in Grand Ronde. But, although she lived close, she describes herself as growing up a bit disconnected from culture, and is seeking to rekindle that connection now. 'I wasn't raised in my culture,' Connelly said. 'Now that I am a young adult, I don't want my kids to be raised separated from culture. Reconnecting with my culture has just been a relief and made me at peace.' Connelly graduated from Willamina High School last year and moved to Grand Ronde in December. She now splits her time between her apartment in Grand Ronde and the dorms at Southern Oregon University in Ashland. Connelly describes a mixed experience in the Willamina School District, including seeing a lot of racism and sexism in school. By high school, she began to develop her voice as an advocate for women and Indigenous people. Now, that means tapping into her creative voice through poetry and the characters she hopes to both portray and write. '[Indigneous people], we're powerful. We have gone through so much throughout decades and hundreds of thousands of years,' Connelly said. 'And we are still here. And that is saying so much.' Connelly first developed an interest in acting in middle school. 'In eighth grade, I took drama class and I just fell in love with acting,' Connelly said, remembering being in her first play that year called 'The Wedding.' The next year she attended Willamina High School, which has an enrollment of about 300. As a freshman, Connelly took a media production class with Ryan Lewis, the school's performing arts director. She continued to take his classes all throughout high school, acting in a few short films. In her junior year media production class, the students were assigned basic script writing, but Connelly went above and beyond. She wrote, produced and starred in a 25-minute film titled 'Maryona Spirit of Wildwood.' In the film, Connelly plays the spirit of a young woman named Maryona who has come back to haunt the Wildwood hotel, where she died. 'She took on a leadership role in that she wrote out a script and she proposed the idea of shooting a film that she wrote,' Lewis said. 'I respect her work ethic and her follow through because she does not fail to deliver. And that's fairly uncommon with a kid that age.' That year, the entire class ended up working on the film together. Connelly helped organize a bake sale at the local Wildwood hotel and the class raised $800 in one day to go toward production costs, according to Lewis. The class spent many weeks working on the film, shooting at multiple locations, including the Grand Ronde Tribal Police Station, the Wildwood Hotel and a local pond. 'Going into it, we didn't really know what to expect,' said Taylor Brooks, who starred in the film and is now Connelly's boyfriend. 'It turned from this mini project into something special that really brought the whole class together.' As Connelly pursues her dreams of being both behind the camera and on screen, she also hopes to continue to dedicate attention to other creative outlets. Connelly is a drummer and Brooks is also a musician, primarily playing electric bass. They hope to one day play in a band together. Connelly is also a writer, using poetry as a space to help process her emotions. In her first term at Southern Oregon University, Connelly has already begun to dive into theater classes with an introduction to acting class, a script analysis class and a carpentry class. As she thinks about her future career, both behind the scenes and on screen, she is determined to create films that portray strong, Indigenous women characters. This story is co-published by and , a news partnership that covers Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest. Funding is provided in part by Meyer Memorial Trust. Our stories are worth telling. Our stories are worth sharing. Our stories are worth your support. Contribute $5 or $10 today to help ICT carry out its critical mission. Sign up for ICT's free newsletter.
