Exactly. Much of the intellectual work is, in fact, intellectual labor. It’s mostly about combining various information in one place — the exact task that LLM far outperforms human. People traditionally misclassified this class of work as “creative”. It’s not really.

Having a new insight that leads to the combination of two distinct ideas is definitionally creative.

You can say this problem needed a low amount of total creativity, but saying it's void of all creativity seems wrong.

Yeah, I've been grappling with the definition of creativity too. There's a gamedev talk [0] on creativity that gave me useful perspective. Here's what I wrote elsewhere:

---

i've been thinking about raph's definition of creativity [0]: permuting one set of ideas with another set of ideas

(or trying an idea in new contexts)

this is a systematic process, doable even by machine once enough pattern libraries have been catalogued.

on a small scale, there's sprint.cards [1] or oblique strats [2]. on a large scale, there's llms...

it's freeing to approach creativity as a deliberate practice rather than waiting on some fickle muse. yet it's a bit disappointing to see idea generation so mechanical and dehumanized.

i am comforted by the value of mushy human abilities surrounding the creative process:

mostly 1) taste, the ability to recognize pleasing output,

...

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyVTxGpEO30

[1] https://sprint.cards/

[2] https://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html

I agree except: this is creative work. Creativity can be and is being mechanised. True originality is extremely rare. Most novelty is the repurposing of one idea or concept elsewhere in a way we call find surprising, but the choice to apply A to B could have been made for any reason including mechanical: very many inventions are accidents. In-depth knowledge / conceptual understanding of something is built on abstraction, and abstractions are portable.

If you had a list of N concepts and M ways to apply them you could try all N*M combinations, and get some very interesting results. For a real example, see the theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ)'s amusing "40 principles of invention" by Soviet inventor Genrich Altshuller. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ

What is your idea of "creative"/"creativity" then?

Maybe all intellectual work is intellectual labor?

This is exactly what creativity is.

> Much of the intellectual work is, in fact, intellectual labor.

That's a great point. It's in line with research being carried on the backs of graduate students, whose work is to hyperfocus on areas.

Isn't that science too?

> Much of the intellectual work is, in fact, intellectual labor.

Not surprisimg, because the two words you used are synonyms. Who did ever classify mathematical work as creative? Kids in third grade math class?

> that LLM far outperforms human.

LLMs only outperform humans in creating loads of bullshit. 6 years in and they remain shiny toys for easily impressionable idiots.