Will Machines Out-Create Us? The Crowd's First Votes Lean Toward the Robots

Put a poet, a paintbrush and a very large neural network in the same lab, and sooner or later someone will ask who wins. That is exactly the experiment the crowd on Morfi started less than a day ago, with one question: will AI surpass human creativity? The first readings are in, and the petri dish is already bubbling.

Some background before we poke the specimen. The question sits inside computational creativity, the field that studies and builds systems to emulate creative processes. Margaret Boden defined creativity as the ability to come up with ideas or artifacts that are new, surprising, and valuable, according to that field's overview. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argued that novelty and value must be judged by the surrounding field of other people, which means the jury matters as much as the artist.

The real-world data points are suitably odd. In 2018 the AI artwork Edmond de Belamy sold at Christie's for US$432,500, almost 45 times its estimate, per the AI art entry. Yet in August 2023 a United States district court ruled that AI art is ineligible for copyright because it lacks human authorship. So the market has said yes to the machine's work, and the law has said not quite.

Now the crowd. "AI surpasses most domains" leads at 42% consensus with 149 holders, while "Humans remain leading overall" trails at 29% consensus with 71 holders. Remember, those percentages measure the crowd's conviction per side, not the share of people. Also on the ballot: 1 other side. So far 166 unique traders have put $247,606 behind their opinions.

My take, and this is opinion, not data: the question is a bit like asking whether a calculator surpasses mathematicians. It wins at arithmetic, yet nobody asks the calculator what is worth calculating. Fun fact: Boden's definition needs "surprising", and surprise lives in the observer's head, so the crowd is also voting on its own capacity to be startled. I suspect the hybrid camp is the sleeper, because the best experiments usually pair a curious human with a tireless instrument.

What to watch next: whether the early lead holds once the opening-day enthusiasts are joined by skeptics, and whether the hybrid and context-dependent camps gather momentum. It is one day old, so treat it as a first reading, not a result. These numbers come from opinion markets on Morfi, where people back their views with real money. Join the market, add your own data point, and let us see if the humans stage a comeback.