The Emulation Game: Part 1.

I’ve always loved Woody Allen's, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying."

Who knew his hope might become reality?

Okay, it'll be a silicon simulacrum, not the real flesh and blood schlimazel, to whom bad fortune (and a few Oscars) persist in coming his way. But the ghostly echo of his jokes, and the laughter that follows, might now entertain for centuries.

Assuming, of course, that AGI and artificial super intelligence aren't an extinction event.

Over the weekend, after watching three Woody's in a row — Annie Hall (still brilliant and beautiful), Manhattan (spoiler alert: forget the pedophilia, the city remains the real star), and Deconstructing Harry (a super simple plot thread, nothing else is) — I was inspired to try an experiment with Perplexity.ai.

Prompt: "Writing in the style of Woody Allen, what is a definition of creativity?"

The result is below, but the implications reverberate. 

Not because the spit-up was generally better than the usual AI output, requiring only a bit of tweaking. Instead, what caught the eye and teased the mind was a phrase in the original prompt:

"...in the style of."

You often see that in fine art, courtesy of various assistants, acolytes, and other yes-there-were-followers-before-the-interwebs who worked in, visited, or just happened past the studio where a Rembrandt van Rijn was putting finishing touches on a masterpiece.

That the artist was ripped off, err, celebrated as inspiration, is not in question. Nor is there any doubt that the market clearly and pragmatically values those works far less than the real deals.

While a 16th-century Da Vinci-a-like might run as much as $50,000, an original, authenticated Leonardo will peg in excess of $100 million.

All of which brings us full circle, make that full Kandinsky, back to AI and the nub of the thing:

In my experiment, where do we find the real genius: AI or Woody, the modeler or the modeled?

Before you answer, consider this: 

If there’s no pattern, even the most sophisticated pattern recognition system has nothing to recognize.

If creative is worthy of both emulation and immortality, surely, it’s worth more than imitation.