Artificial Intelligence and Creativity in the extra-moral Sense

At a time when the Sony World Photography Award 2023 has been awarded to an AI-generated work of art, when Hollywood screenwriters are protesting in the streets of Los Angeles, and when Large Language Models are set to take up more and more of our cognitive activities, it’s urgent to ask whether the human creative force—that of authors, screenwriters, artists and even scientists—has not become alienated in combinatorics. Have LLM AIs embodied the “level 2 exploitation” of cognitive capitalism, i.e. the total exploitation of the force of invention (creativity, intelligence, innovation)? To answer this question, the article proposes to enter into combinatorics as one enters into the Library of Babel, i.e. to lose oneself in order to better find oneself.