#AI#3. Borges, AI and the Library of the Possible. Probability, possibility and creativity in the era of generative AI

 

 

There is a recurring objection against Artificial Intelligence: it cannot be truly creative, because it only moves among ideas already produced by human beings.

Perhaps this criticism arises from a profound misunderstanding about the selfvery meaning of creation.

No idea comes from nothing. Human knowledge develops through continuity, transformations, crossings: theories that dialogue with other theories, images that return, intuitions that recombine, languages ​​that contaminate each other.

The immense cultural heritage on which AI acts is not a simple repository of data. It is already a constellation of previous acts of creation: books, formulas, symbols, errors, metaphors, philosophical visions, scientific models, artistic works, narrative structures.

But every idea already formulated can become, in turn, the living material of a new configuration. Creativity does not erase what precedes it: it passes through it, recomposes it, arranges it according to unexpected relationships.

In this sense, AI resembles the Library of Babel Of Jorge Luis Borges: a library composed of all possible combinations of signs. In that combinatorial vertigo, the question is not only what has been written, but also what could be written.

And this is where the objection against AI is reversed. When the combinations become immense, almost infinite, we are no longer faced with a simple mechanical repetition. We are faced with a space of the possible.

Of course, the combination alone is not enough. The Library of Babel also contains noise, chaos, insignificant variations. But creativity does not consist in producing all possible combinations. It consists in recognizing, among billions of possibilities, those rare configurations capable of generating meaning, knowledge, beauty or truth.

He had already guessed it Henri Poincaré speaking of scientific discovery: inventing does not mean accumulating random combinations, but discerning the fruitful ones. Discovery is selection, recognition, form.

This is precisely where AI becomes interesting. Not because it replaces human intelligence, rather it crosses a combinatorial space immensely wider than that accessible to a single mind: texts, images, mathematical models, disciplines, analogies, languages, symbolic structures.

Many great scientific revolutions were born like this: from the unexpected encounter between distant domains. Mathematics and physics. Biology and information. Linguistics and logic. Philosophy and neuroscience. Novelty does not always emerge from a totally new element, but from a new relationship between already existing elements.

Margaret Boden distinguishes three forms of creativity: combinatorial, exploratory and transformative. The first combines known ideas in unexpected ways; the second explores new conceptual spaces; the third modifies the very rules of the creative space. From this perspective, some forms of AI already seem to participate at least at the first two levels.

Borges can also be added Italo Calvino. In the Castle of Crossed Destinies, stories arise from the combination of tarot cards: a finite number of symbols produces a virtually inexhaustible plurality of narratives. It is one of the central intuitions of combinatorial literature: you don't need an infinite amount of materials to generate new worlds; elements, rules, permutations and interpretations are enough. From Queneau to Perec up to Calvin, combinatorial literature shows something essential: constraint does not destroy creativity. Sometimes it even makes it more powerful, because it forces thought to explore configurations that would otherwise never have emerged.

There is perhaps a further step. We accept quite easily that sudden intuitions, fruitful errors, unexpected associations or even forms of randomness intervene in human creativity. What we struggle most to accept is not so much the role of chance in creativity, but the idea that new forms can emerge from extremely complex combinatorial processes, even when these processes seem purely mechanical or probabilistic. Perhaps because we continue to associate creativity with an exclusively human gesture, intentional and irreducible to any form of calculation. Yet, even the human imagination seems to continually cross immense networks of possibilities: collisions between distant memories, unexpected analogies, lateral connections, variations, selections. Twentieth century physics, from quantum mechanics al uncertainty principle, has undermined the idea of ​​a rigidly deterministic universe. Without forcing improper analogies, we can however recognize a common suggestion: order can emerge from fluctuation, form from indeterminacy, discovery from highly unlikely configurations. Perhaps, beyond a certain threshold of complexity, the combination stops appearing as simple mechanical repetition and becomes an exploration of the possible.

AI also operates within immense combinatorial groups. Alone, this exploration is not yet thought. But when it encounters a human question, an intention, an interpretative criterion, then some configurations can suddenly become intuition, idea, possibility.

The theme is then intertwined with possibilism.
Robert Musil he spoke of the "sense of possibility": the ability not to remain prisoners of what already exists, but to also perceive what could exist. Eugenio Colorni he saw possibilism as a concrete search for possibilities hidden within apparently closed situations. Perhaps AI fits right into this space. Not between mechanism and creativity, as is often said, but within the profound relationship between combination, probability and imagination.

AI does not create from nothing. Nobody creates from nothing. The real question is another: how many ideas were already possible, but not yet thinkable, because no one had yet crossed enough connections to be able to see them?

Perhaps the future of creativity will be born right here: in the encounter between the Library of Babel of machines, the probabilistic part of the imagination and the human sense of possibility.

#AI #Borges #Calvino #Creativity #Possibilism #MargaretBoden #Musil #EugenioColorni





Appendix – The combinatorial vertigo of the Library of Babel

In the story The Library of Babel, Borges describes a library composed of all possible combinations of alphabetic signs. The structure is defined with almost mathematical precision:

“[...] Each wall of each hexagon corresponds to five shelves; each shelf contains thirty-two books of uniform format; each book has four hundred and ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, forty black letters.”

Borges' Library is therefore not a simple metaphor of the infinite, but a rigorous combinatorial construction: a finite system of symbols that generates an immeasurable space of possibilities.

Assuming, as indicated in the story, an alphabet of 25 symbols, each book contains:

410 pages × 40 lines × 40 characters = 656,000 characters

Since each character can be chosen from 25 different symbols, the total number of possible books is:

N = 25^656,000

To have a more intuitive order of magnitude, we can transform the value into a power of 10:

N ≈ 10^917.048

Meaning what:

a 1 followed by approximately 917 thousand zeros; that is, the theoretical number of all books that can be generated combinatorially assuming the conditions described by Borges: an alphabet of 25 symbols and books of 410 pages, each composed of 40 lines of 40 characters.

It is an immensely higher number to: