What is creativity and how does it work in the brain? Are all brains creative? And what does that tell us about

the evolution of species and the evolution of ideas? How do the arts expose what's happening in the brain?

And what does that have to do with how

cell phones got their names and why koala bears don't write novels? Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me,

David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford, and in these episodes, we dive into our

three-pound universe to uncover the most surprising secrets behind our daily lives.

Today's episode is about creativity.

What is it and how do brains do it,

and why do human brains do it better than anyone else in the animal kingdom?

So I'm going to start tangentially with two stories that have hit the news in recent weeks.

The first is that there are no fewer than

nine copyright infringement lawsuits raging in the courts right now with groups suing

Open AI and meta and other companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, the groups

suing are creatives, they're writers,

and they're suing because their books were consumed

in the training of these massive generative AI systems,

these large language models like ChatGPT.

So one of the suits calls this, quote, systematic theft on a mass scale.

In other words, the suit asserts that these large language models are producing nothing

fundamentally new.

They're just recycling the old and they're remixing that in different ways.

Okay, so that was one story.

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