While people talk about the Turing test as the standard of intelligence AI needs to pass, a new post claims that a “Tolkien test” would be more appropriate for today’s Large Language Models. Tolkien was an Oxford professor who not only authored The Lord of the Rings but spent decades crafting perhaps the most in-depth and meticulous imaginary worlds in literary history.

Tolkien famously wrote in his essay On Fairy Stories about how human beings can be classified as “sub-creators” because we are made in the image of a creative God. For Tolkien, creating works of art, building cathedrals, or designing waterways is a reflection of our nature. We are created to create.

But where might AI creations fit into that elegant conception of creativity? Could ChatGPT ever hope to get close to the creative depth found in Tolkien’s Middle-earth? John Hartley comments that, unsurprisingly, no: AI is a sub-creation of the sub-creator and so is “twice-removed” from the divine origins of creative work. It will always be a tributary to human intelligence. Hartley writes,

The Tolkien test for AI is whether it can ‘create’ genuinely original work that bears no correspondence to anything a human has ever sub-created, as an extension of the original creation act and ultimate expression of originality. To return to Pinsent’s question concerning the justification for the creative imagination in a world of pragmatic materialism, could AI ‘create’ an entire family of imaginary languages for imaginary peoples in an imaginary world? And if it could, would anyone recognize it?

Hartley also writes that intelligence is connected to having a soul that can transcend the material realm. AI, to the contrary, is limited in that regard. It can regurgitate but it can’t create. It can reflect verbiage but can never reflect on the substance or meaning of the words themselves.

Human creativity, I would argue, depends on pre-existing material to function. We have to read books in order to write well, learn music theory in order to compose piano pieces, etc. But our intelligence is qualitatively different than algorithms working with data inputs. Human creativity involves sentience, soul, and relationship. To be a sub-creator doesn’t mean creating things out of nothing, as theists believe God did prior to physical time and space, but neither does it mean offering predetermined outputs divorced from personal choice. We have the choice and the intellect required to create. The evidence for this, from city skyscrapers to novels like War and Peace, abounds.