A bit is a coin with two faces. It is 0 or it is 1, and there is nothing in between. Stack enough of them and you can represent a staggering number of states, but the set is still countable. You could, in principle, list every configuration a digital machine can ever be in. It would be a long list. It would also be finite.
The brain does not work this way. It is analog. Between 0 and 1 there sits not a gap but a continuum, an infinity of values, and the signal can land anywhere along it. My claim is that somewhere in that infinity sits the spark we call creativity.
Not the recombination of things already seen, which a finite system does well, but the move that does not follow from the inputs. I argue that this is why I resist, on principle, the idea that we already have AI art.
What we call AI art today seems to me something more honest and more modest. It is human artistic experimentation carried out through prompting. The person doing the choosing, the steering, the rejecting of a thousand near-misses until one image lands, that person is the artist. The machine is the brush. A very good brush, trained on everything we have ever drawn, but a brush still picking from a finite shelf of possibilities.
I hold this loosely. Engineers are already building neuromorphic and analog chips, hardware that computes with continuous values rather than clean ones and zeros, precisely to close this gap. If creativity really does live in the continuum, that is where you would go looking for it.
So the word I keep returning to is yet. Not never. The machine does not have its own spark yet. Whether the gap between the finite and the infinite is one we can engineer across, or one that stays open, I genuinely do not know.