Is AI Creativity genuine or just sophisticated plagarism?

BPP’s School of Technology hosted its first online debate event in April, bringing together apprentice teams for a lively and thought-provoking discussion. Hear two teams of apprentices go head-to-head as they challenge assumptions, explore opposing viewpoints, and put their communication and critical thinking skills to the test. The central question: Is AI creativity genuine innovation, or simply sophisticated plagiarism? The audience was polled to decide who gave the most completing argument, so stay turned to the end to find out who won.

I'm Idris Fabiyi, Head of Technology and Innovation at BPP University, Estio Training, Firebrand Training & host of the TechSphere podcast. I'm on a mission to demystify complex technology and make it accessible for businesses and learners.

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Get in Touch: idrisfabiyi@bpp.com 

Transcript

SPEAKER_08 0:09

Okay, so really good turnout. So thanks a lot for everyone to um who's uh in the room supporting our first debate event, which we've organized for our learners. We are planning for this to be a regular fixture in our events calendar. So um yeah, keep an eye out for future debates. And if you want to participate, you can always reach out to me and then we'll give you the subjects that we are planning on debating. Um, so as a reminder, the two teams are going to debate is AI creativity genuine or just sophisticated plagiarism? So we've got team one, um, Aguna, Holiane, and Abdul will be arguing it's genuine. Team two, made up of Leticia, FunMe and Saiju, will argue that it's sophisticated plagiarism. So once the debate is over, we'll open the floor up to some audience questions. Um, and you know, you can ask the teams. Um, and then we are going to have an audience poll to vote on the winning team. Now, when it comes to voting for the winning team, um, you are voting on which team gave the most convincing argument. So that's um uh that's the one rule um for the voting. So good luck to both teams. I hope everyone enjoys the debate. Um, and now I'm going to hand over to Scott Kenyon, who's going to be our debate host. Take it away, Scott.

SPEAKER_09 1:24

Thank you very much, Kate. So uh welcome everybody, welcome to the first uh debate. Um, we will go be going back and forward. Both teams know the rules. We all know about rules, people will try and break them. So I'm here with the to make sure we stick to it. Um the chat is open. Um so if you've got um if the audience have got like a burning question and they they don't want to wait the half an hour to ask it, put it in the chat. We will visit that at the end. Um so I'll first of all we'll move for opening remarks. So this is each team's opportunity to kind of set their scene, okay, and start their debate. So we'll first of all we'll go with team one. If you want to start with your opening remarks, you'll have right around about four to five minutes. If you run out of time, don't worry, I've not got a big gong. Um, we'll just go for it. Okay, so team one, who's going first?

SPEAKER_07 2:12

Um, I'll start us off, uh Scott. Thank you very much. Um right, okay. So let's look at the question itself. Is AI creativity genuine or just sophisticated plagiarism, right? Now let's start off with pure definition alone. Plagiarism means copying someone else's work and then passing it off as your own with the intent to deceive. Now, by pure definition, AI cannot plagiarize. But let's get into how AI actually works, right? So AI isn't designed to retrieve and paste information like a database, right? It learns off of patterns across large amounts of data and then produces new outputs based on responses to prompts, right? Now, why am I telling you how AI works? Because it's to do with the aspect of creativity. Now, creativity has never meant creating something from nothing, right? Creativity is like Lego, the bricks already exist, but the thing is, the the thing that you build is still original. Now, unless we're prepared to say that humans aren't creative because they learned languages, styles, and ideas from other people or from other civilizations, we cannot pass off AI creativity as plagiarism. So the real question becomes is the output copied or created?

SPEAKER_09 3:52

Is that all for team one? Is that your full opening statement?

SPEAKER_07 3:56

Uh that is our opening statement, yes.

SPEAKER_09 3:59

Okay, brilliant. That's a very uh very good, very good thought and uh thinking about it and phrasing it in a way that uh pulls you in. So, team two, um, your opening statement, please, and then we'll get into back and forth rebuttal. So, who's going for the opening statement on team two, please?

SPEAKER_03 4:16

I will jump in on this one here.

SPEAKER_09 4:18

Thank you very much. So, on we go. So, begin your opening statement.

SPEAKER_03 4:22

So, by definition, generative AI is sophisticated plagiarism, and that's not an argument or an opinion, it's just a fact. Uh, as a software engineering apprentice, I've invested a lot of time into understanding AI and putting my time and effort into understanding the potential of both generative and agentic AI to improve productivity and ways of working. And to be completely clear, generative AI can be both extremely useful and sophisticated plagiarism. These two things aren't mutually exclusive. Before we start to debate AI creativity, we first have to understand what it actually is. So, artificial intelligence, and I know Abdul touched on this, but artificial intelligence refers to machines performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. Beyond that, machine learning is a subset of AI where systems learn from large volumes of data to perform more specific tasks. And then generative AI is a further subset focused on creating new content. If you ask Copilot to explain generative AI in its own simple terms, it says Gen AI is a subset of artificial intelligence that creates new content such as text, images, and music by learning patterns from existing data. Now, the data here is a central part to machine learning and Gen AI in general. We train models to recognize patterns across many different types of digitized data, like text, images, audio, anything you can put in your computer. These models don't understand the data. They predict what comes next. For example, if you show a model seven images of puppies and ask it to generate one, then it will replicate the patterns it's seen. But in reality, these models aren't trained on seven harmless images. They're trained on hundreds of millions of data points taken from all across the internet, with or without the user's consent. Through my studies learning more about AI, I became a Google certified Gen AI leader. And during that training, I noted this statement from Google itself saying Gen AI can assist in generating ideas and exploring possibilities, but human ingenuity is needed to push boundaries and develop innovative solutions. Even industry leaders such as Google recognize that humans must remain involved to prompt, validate, and guide outputs. And this leads to a concept that some people in the room might have heard about that's H I T L or Human in the Loop. And my tutor from Google actually described it as human in the lead. Humans select the training data, humans write the prompts, humans review and correct the outputs, humans provide the feedback that allow these systems to improve. At its core, AI is a machine built by humans, learning only because humans decided to do so. I'll end our closing statement, or opening statement, rather, with one final observation from Copilot itself. Unlike traditional AI, generative AI can produce original outputs that mimic human creativity. Even an AI agent acknowledges this limitation. Generative AI does not create in a truly human sense. It just imitates the patterns of creativity rather than originating them. This reinforces our central argument that we will discuss later that creativity is inherently human, grounded in lived experiences, emotion, and conscious intent. Qualities that AI can replicate in form that cannot truly understand in essence. Thank you.

SPEAKER_09 8:12

Thank you. Beautiful opening statement. And Bob on time as well. She makes it so much easier for me. Okay. A lot of food for thought there from your opening statement and from team one's. And then teams two's. So have you got a rebuttal to the wonderful words from the teacher there? Yes. From team one.

SPEAKER_07 8:41

Yes, so um I'll start us off. Um and okay, so the opening statement kind of it proved my point, right? In the question itself, right? We're good because we're not here to discuss the human aspect of AI. We all know that AI just cannot start typing by itself, start producing random things by itself. Human aspect is always there, but that's not the question. The question is, is AI's creativity genuine? Right? We're talking about AI, we're not talking about the human. So I'm gonna pull it back into the question itself, right? Plagiarism is a human act, the responsibility lies with the user, not with the tool, right? So, in an article uh called Plagiarism, Copyright and AI by University of Chicago, written by Mark Levy and Lisa Lemoore, right? They make sure and they make the clear point that plagiarism is dependent on human intent and attribution. Right? AI cannot claim authorship or pass off work as its own. If plagiarism does occur, it is a failure of the user and not the system itself. Blaming AI for plagiarism would be like blaming the brush for the artist's mistake.

SPEAKER_09 10:08

If any of my teammates have anything else to attribute, what what I'll do is based on what you've said there the lad, I died that the paint brush metaphor. I love a good metaphor, it makes it a lot more easier to get complex into non-complex. Team two. Um do you want to come against that? Because basically, Abdul's just said your first opening statement is wrong. Um, so what's your kind of response back? Uh Saji.

SPEAKER_02 10:33

Hi guys, yeah. So let's let's focus on your initial intro, Abdul. You seem you brought up the Lego brick analogy. So I'll tell you the reason why it fails is because while both humans and AI build from existing ideas, yeah, you're right. But true creativity involves conscious understanding and intention. There's a meaningful transformation that takes place when creativity is involved. Um, humans interpret influencers all the time through lived experiences and and selectively reshape them for their creative ideas. Whereas AI just statistically recombines those patterns from vast amounts of data that is fed into the system and then it uncredits those people that have created those work. So let's go with your analogy. So, for example, if a student took like 10 essays, for example, and broke them down into patterns and then reassembled them back into one main essay, um, citing it without no resources, no sources, there's no references involved, that would still be considered a plagiarism. Yeah. Even if it does appear original. See, that's essentially what AI is doing. So you're saying, like, let's go back to the main argument. I would argue that AI creativity is not creativity at all. Because when something's not genuinely creative, but only reusing other people's existing work, that's essentially what AI is. Um, and there's zero too little credit given to them, it falls into the category of plagiarism. So that's what I argue.

SPEAKER_07 12:05

So um Aguna, I'll let you take this. One second.

SPEAKER_09 12:08

One second. We'll go there is um I'm gonna go, I'm gonna get everyone has the one voice first, and then you all can jump in. So Tadju, thanks for that. Really good articulate. And I'm gonna go back to team one. Um so we're gonna you want to kind of come in from team one and and go against? Is that all right?

SPEAKER_05 12:27

Yeah, of course. Um, so that point that you actually made, this conflates creative process with creative value. If we judge a creative output based on whether there was intent, emotion, or lived experiences behind its creation, then we're giving it value based on how it was produced, but not actually discounting that it was creative. So historically, creativity has been evaluated by outputs, not internal mental states like emotion or intent. Evolutionary processes like natural selection, collaborative works with distributed intent, which is like the combination of ideas, which is what AI does as well, or most importantly, the existence of accidental discoveries being also classified as creative discoveries. So, some examples of this would be the drip painting by Jackson Pallock. He once um set down a bunch of canvases around him to help with his creative process, and he let gravity, motion, and chances lead the now famous drip technique. This is something that was accidentally created and now has become something that is used by and recognized by many artists. So if you discount a process like that, or even something like, if we were to do it scientifically, the accidental creation of vulcanized rubber or microwaves that we now use to create to microwave our food, which were all accidental by the way, then in that sense, you are saying that all those accidental human outputs that had no intention behind them, no emotion, and no lived experiences don't count as creativity.

SPEAKER_09 14:15

Thank you for that. I always like when someone um mentioned Jackson Pollock. That's cool. I really like that one. What I'm gonna do is um I'm gonna flick back over to team one. Um Holly Ann, if you've got a response to that, which allow each team to at least go go one each. I think you've got tech problems before.

SPEAKER_04 14:40

Um I hate to say this. My I'm in I'm in the uh BPP office and the Wi-Fi for that whole thing was completely cut out. So somebody could please just give a little quick re quick recap. That would be amazing.

SPEAKER_09 14:50

Okay, I'm sorry. So we're basically we we've done opens. I know I say technically, we've done the opening statements, we're back and forward on rebuttals now. So you are you are looking to re uh go back on on what's what's just being said there, um uh and adding to it from your team, um, and your team's obviously argument is um it's AI creativity is genuine.

SPEAKER_04 15:14

Of course, of course.

SPEAKER_09 15:15

Um has team two just uh no team one, so we're gonna adding from yourself first, so add on to what's been what's been discussed.

SPEAKER_04 15:23

Perfect, perfect. Well, uh, if I remember correctly, what we have already talked about is we um estimation that AI cannot play cannot plagiarise because of the underpinning purpose and underpinning explanation of plagiarism being the intent to deceive, to admit, to pass it off as your own as your mark, which obviously AI is um cannot work with intent because it just works on what it's supposed to do. It is a tool. Um I'm assuming we talked about the entertainment industry and um the oh god's name.

SPEAKER_07 16:01

No, no, no. No, no, no, no, um yes, yeah, that was mentioned.

SPEAKER_04 16:06

Perfect. Yeah, I think that's another you know, I think the perspectives is something that I urge our audience to look at here because what this debate yes, the perspectives of AI and the ethics, the ethics of AI can be debated here, but we're here to focus on the question, and we would like to argue the fact that AI creativity is a is a gen is a genuine skill. Um so to most of this, I would like to ask the obvious opposing what would you define creativity as? And that is sort of a uh an answer I would like to hear before I um rebuttal that good, throwing it over.

SPEAKER_09 16:49

So for me, if you wanna come in on that one, what one what is creativity? Um wanna kind of review that one.

SPEAKER_06 17:01

Um creativity to me is a freedom of expression. And to I think this is something that comes from we as sentient beings, AI doesn't have that capability to truly be creative. If I'm just recombining a whole load of different things, I'm just regurgitating, I'm not really being creative.

SPEAKER_09 17:34

Okay, that's a good way to put it. I think we've talked a bit about obviously going back and forward there. Uh Sad, you're looking to add on to that?

SPEAKER_02 17:41

Yeah, just adding on to what Funmi's mentioned. So creativity is not just about producing something that's new or impressive. You know, creativity comes from feelings, memories, there's struggle, there's culture involved, this has a personal value to it. There's creativity involved in artists and writers and musicians, and they create because they live in a world and they respond emotionally to the society around them. I think that's what creativity is. And your point that you mentioned on Pollock and the accidental discovery on art, it doesn't actually remove human creativity, it actually like highlights it because he intentionally created the conditions for that randomness to take place, you know. He used his judgment to recognize um and and set the the features involved within that environment for the accident to occur. Um so if if random, if like paint was randomly spilt, you know, and no one and there's no one to interpret it, it wouldn't be concerned art. You know, there's still human involvement within the creativity aspect of it. Um so AI lacks us entirely. Um it cannot recognize the value or the intent of what it produces. So while it generates just random outputs um based on instructions from humans, creative act still lies within the humans that prompt it. You know, so AI itself is not truly creative. That's my counter-argument for that.

SPEAKER_09 19:08

Okay, thank you. I'll I'll throw it back to to Holly Ann because you kind of um threw it at them, and then we'll go off from Holly Ann if you want to go to that and then uh Abdul, if you add on to Hollyan afterwards. So Holly Ann is on you first.

SPEAKER_04 19:23

Um, I am here to argue that creativity can be defined in a different way. Um, I would argue it is a skill and it is a process that takes place now to uh back me up on this. Um is a theory called the uh combinational creativity, and what it is, it is a um theory I think it's in classic psychology, I believe, and it talks about the process of how creativity is done, and what it what it argues is uh sorry, just give me one catching up on your notes, it's okay. No, no, no, I I've had somebody walk past on the on the epo. Um so what combination of creativity argues is that humans create new ideas by combining past experiences, past knowledge, and past ideas that other people have already already worked on. Um so what I would argue is that follows the same format in the way that it that AI learns and gen and generates ideas. I would argue that the way that um you know sorry.

SPEAKER_09 20:48

Well do you wanna do you want to throw it over to Abdul? Of course, yeah. Yeah, so we'll throw it over to Abdul to obviously add on to what you said there to complete the full rebuttal of team one going back. So Abdul, do you want to add to your team there?

SPEAKER_07 21:00

Of course, yeah. So uh Saju mentioned the point that AI uses patterns, right? Now the the the aspect of data being used by AI. Now, creativity itself is synthesis, it is the joining of information. Now, there is an individual, Advit uh Sarkar, explains in his book or in his um piece, Beyond Mechanized Plagiarism and AI, right? That AI creativity works through synthesis of existing knowledge, and that is exactly how human creativity works, right? Humans do not create from nothing, that's not how it works. We learn, we internalize, and then we build on those ideas over time. Now, if synthesis is invalidated creativity, then most human art. Science and innovation wouldn't have happened either.

SPEAKER_09 22:06

I'm gonna throw it over to uh Letitia there, and then uh for me if you add to Letitia from the same team as well, um, because obviously we'd rather just one back and forward, looks like we're getting a couple, and it's really adding a good argument. So back over to team two of Letitia if you want to add on.

SPEAKER_03 22:22

Yeah, so Abdul, you said specifically humans do not create from nothing. That's true. Humans don't create from nothing. Humans take in the many things that we've learned and turn that into creativity, but that is different from a computer learning data. A computer learning data is a very static, almost like sanitized process where everything's very organized, whereas a human creating things based off what they've learned comes from their emotions, their life experiences, the world they live in. These are all things a computer can't recognize. While a computer, yes, can look at a million pictures and then create a picture themselves, they aren't in the computer can't input any of its own genuine thought into it because it doesn't have genuine thought, and that takes away the definition of creativity. How can you be creative if you don't have your own genuine thoughts? And I'll pass straight over to Fan Mi.

SPEAKER_09 23:30

Add to that from your team.

SPEAKER_06 23:34

I also agree with you, um Abdul. Um, we as humans we look at lots of different things and we take that in to inspire us. And AI uh does the same, it learns from the contents of a lot of other human creators, but we're frequently finding that these creators are not giving their consent for their work to be used to trade AI models, they're not being credited and they're not being paid for these things. So if we're debating whether AI creativity is genuine and its skill is coming from absorbing the works of others without permission or compensation, then how can we really call that output genuine creativity? It's questionable, and that's why we're arguing that it's closer to sophisticated paganism. Um, last month, the Parliament's um digital communications committee actually posted a report um on the UK website citing that creative industries are facing a clear and present danger from generative AI. So they also said, and I quote, that explicit consent or remuneration are not being given for their for the human creators' work. So the protection given to creators through copyrights are being threatened, and there's a lack of transparency there. So that also leaves the content owners unable to enforce their rights. So we're even seeing this at a policy level, and there's also been legal cases in the US as well. So, for example, September last year, Anthropic was sued by writers for um using their work to train AI models, but their work is a copyrighted, so this is a piracy issue. And um even OpenAI, Microsoft Meta, they're all being sued for similar cases as well. So we're seeing a large part of society fighting the fairness of using work that's been copyrighted to train AI, for AI to give an output of what we consider creativity. So, you know, if a company uses the work of others to build their products without consent or payment, we would question whether that's genuine creativity. And if a student does the same thing, writing an assignment without citing the author's owners, we would call it a plagiarism. So AI is useful, but is it original? Is it creative?

SPEAKER_09 26:00

Thank you very much for that for me. I'm gonna I'm gonna throw over to um yourself there, Ugana, um, to kind of come in from from team one um um before we uh get people back forward. So you you come in there from team one on what that Fommy just mentioned.

SPEAKER_05 26:15

Yeah, um so from what you said, Famy, two points are made, talking about plagiarism as well as um kind of like the backlash that comes from it. So to talk about plagiarism, I'll say to that point that creativity is not the creation, as we've all talked about, it's not the creation from something, um, creation of something from nothing. It is not a novel recombination with value. Plagiarism, by contrast, involves, as you said, intentionally copying someone's ideas, um, concepts without transformation or credits. And this distinction matters because just as humans can either plagiarize or creatively transform their influences, AI output depends heavily on how this tool is used. If a user explicitly instructs a model to copy or provide minimal constraints, then naturally homogeneity will be created. But that's misuse. That's not the proof of incapability of creativity. Additionally, modern tools now actively prevent plagiarism. Platforms such as OpenAI and Adobe Firefly have introduced safeguards that reject prompts asking for direct imitations of living artists or copyrighted styles. And this was published in the OpenAI policy updates in 2024. Now, in terms of the backlash when it comes to novel ideas like AI, what I'll say is that you could say that AI right now is kind of like in this steam engine stage, in which we're not quite there at the electric motor stage. So in these cases, when it comes to the demand of AI, then we'll have a demand of more efficiency in terms of its improvements. And we've seen throughout history how novel ideas have been rejected, specifically creative modern ideas. So things like the print impress, which was the very same tool that was needed to distribute artistic mediums like books, magazines, posters, prints, and clothing designs. All of this back in the 15th century was criticized with the fear that it will destroy jobs, it will spread dangerous ideas, and it will be considered morally and culturally destructive. However, we can see now today how authors obviously depend on that same printing, right? And then another example of this would be how we have the um photography. So back in the 19th century, when photography was introduced, people considered it a lazy tool, requiring chemicals and metals and industrial processes. However, now we have photography competitions held by the Sony World Photography Awards and the World Press Photo and all this comes with global recognition.

SPEAKER_09 29:12

That is to say that at right now at the oh sorry, um, I I I I lovely on your point, but I'm slow we're sliding one way, and I want to make sure the points you made at the start I think were really important, and I want to stick to them rather than slide. So that's fine. So what I'm gonna do is we've you've got about 20 to 30 seconds each before we do closing statements. So I'm gonna give say your name, I want to give you rebuttal, and then I'll say a name, give you buttle because I want to have the closing statements at the end to be really concise. So Saju, if you want to come in.

SPEAKER_02 29:50

Yeah, sorry. Um, so just I had a earlier point which I could sort of expand as well. Um, so you mentioned like the I think the human comparison is very misleading, is because uh when humans learn, we don't like absorb millions of pieces of work instantly and silently like encode them into a system and then just regurgitate the styles on demand. There are obviously natural limitations involved when we're humans are creative, like we have selective memory, like um we're I think guess there's partial influence involved when when we're creating ideas, and there's also a slight um trait of imperfection involved as well. So you you also mentioned Pollock earlier, so the accidental art, like that is still a sign of human imperfection, which has led to that. Um, so AI, what AI does is removes those limitations, it just absorbs and replicates the patterns from vast amounts of created work at a large scale, which humans cannot do. So you can't compare human creativity and AI creativity to be the same because there's no attribution involved. Um, because AI doesn't have intent, it doesn't care about what it produces, um, it just generates output because like probabilities align, um, not because it feels or wants to express or believes anything, essentially. Hence why um, so when AI produces art or music, it has no expressive meaning involved. Um, yeah, thanks for that.

SPEAKER_09 31:23

Thank you, Catrice. Thank you, Catrick. Um what I'm gonna do is obviously the people who are speaking, I want you to put your final thoughts into your closing statement. Okay, so what we're gonna do now is we've had the opening statements of team one argue that AI creativity is genuine. Okay, and team two have have come back and argued that actually it's just sophisticated plagiarism. Yeah. So and we got into a bit of a minute a bit about creativity, but a lot of the points that were mentioned were about obviously plagiarism and creativity going back and forward. So we're gonna open it up now to the final closing arguments. So these closing arguments are the point where the team can kind of put together and give their last um point for the audience then to vote on. So we'll first of all we'll go to uh team two, um, because obviously you were second in the opening, so you're first in the close. All right. So team two, I'd like your final closing argument. Okay, be it one of you or three of you, it doesn't matter. You've got a couple of minutes, quite a few minutes to do this. Um, please provide your closing argument.

SPEAKER_06 32:37

So, to close, um, I'd like to bring all three of our points together to talk about what we actually mean in regards to creativity. Um, human beings are responsible, but we're talking about AI creativity, and it is creativity is just is not just about speed or being polished, it's also about recognising, and it's not simply about recognizing patterns. Creativity is something that's deeply human, and it comes from our emotions, our experiences, our memories, and intentions as well. So these things shape why something is created, not just how it looks at the end. And today we're showing how generative AI systems work, how they're trained on um massive amounts of existing human content, and how they learn by identifying patterns and relationship in that data, not by understanding any meaning and not by forming any original intent. So, because of that, AI doesn't imagine, it doesn't it doesn't draw on lived experience, it just recombines what already exists. And we also talked about where that ability comes from. So a large part of the AI's power is built on real people's work, often without consent or payment or um credit. So it's not just an issue that's raised by artists or academics, it's also being recognized by policymakers. And when an AI's output feels hollow or you know, lacking in emotion, it's not by accident. That's because they don't have the experiences that we as humans have. So the system's just reproducing, just reproducing that. So when we put all of this together and we start to see a clear picture, it AI is impressive and it is useful, but the usefulness is not the same as creativity, and imitation is not the same as originality. Um, and you know, in many professional and academic contexts, when we look at ideas and labour and how they're repackaged without credit or consent, we have a word for that, and it is plagiarism. Um so that's that is our closing statement for team two. Thank you.

SPEAKER_09 35:04

Um obviously that is your closing statement, but Saji, do you want to add anything to your closing statement on the back of what Fumi said there? Okay, you've got about it okay.

SPEAKER_02 35:12

So Funmi mentioned um it's not originality, which is essentially true. So because usefulness is not the same as originality. Um, I think throughout the debate, the other team has shown that AI has generated impressive outputs. We don't deny that. You know, AI is powerful, um, it is useful and is transformative, but usefulness is not the same as originality, it's a powerful tool, but it's it's closer to imitation than originality. And for these reasons, I feel AI does not show real creativity, it just proves the argument that it's a sophisticated plagiarism. So that's my point.

SPEAKER_09 35:50

Thank you very much. Good closing statement. I will hand over to team one now to complete your um full closing um statements, please.

SPEAKER_07 36:00

Okay, um, I'll start us off, right? Okay, what team one wants to do is let's actually end this debate, right? Where it's actually started with plagiarism, right? It's to do with the aspect of does AI plagiarize? Now, plagiarism has never meant learning from others, right? It has always meant copying specific work and then passing it off as your own. As discussed previously, and many points that AI doesn't do that, that's not how AI works, it generates outputs by synthesizing knowledge the same way that humans learn, right? It internalizes it and creates humans might not be able to process as much data or recognize as much patterns as AI, but it's still pattern recognition at the end of the day. Now, if this isn't classified as creative, then human creativity also collapses with it. Now, onto teams true point is that creativity has never been judged off of feelings, right? It is judged by results, right? Obviously, the result can push someone towards a certain feeling, um, which is a separate argument, but history has shown clearly, right? For example, photography, digital animation, CGI, all of these tools were dismissed at first, and now they are recognized as creative. Now, AI is simply the next level up, right? If thinking about it in a simple way, right, if AI wasn't creative, it wouldn't be used in the most creative industry in the world. What industry am I talking about? I'm talking about entertainment itself. Now, Netflix has already used generative AI in for a final on-the-screen visual effects in its original series. Don't know if any of you have watched it. Um The Eratus, it's something to do with some spaceman traveling through time. Um, but uh, if we were if AI wasn't creative, it wouldn't be used in such a creative industry. Now, if plagiarism is does occur, it is not to do with the tool. Blaming AI for plagiarism, as I said before, blaming AI for plagiarism is like blaming the brush for the artist's mistake. So when you strip everything away, right? The question is simple. Is the output copied or is it newly created? Then, if it's newly created, then the evidence says that then calling AI's creativity plagiarism isn't analysis, it's simply a misunderstanding.

SPEAKER_09 38:48

Thank you very much, Abdul. Okay. If does team one want to add anything to Abdul's point there? Are we okay to finalise?

SPEAKER_04 38:58

I would like to uh do my closing point.

SPEAKER_09 39:01

Yeah, go on, Hollyan. You had your closing point on on top of team one.

SPEAKER_04 39:04

Just to start off, I just want to apologise for the difficulties that I had because it threw me off, threw me off my point. So, as I mentioned earlier, I'm here to argue that creativity is a skill and a process that is echoed in the creativity of AI, and originality maybe isn't what you believe it to be. So there's a neuroscience uh process called, and let's see if I can get this right, neural recombination. And for me, that explains how combinational creativity occurs in the brain. So, how this works is the brain acts as a sort of uh remixer to break experiences, sensory inputs, uh past past knowledge and past ideas, breaks them into fragments and blends them together in new novel ways. Uh, that is a process that happens in the brain that creativity is uh that is responsible for creativity. And I would argue that AI creativity is genuine because it echoes the same process. Now, sure, there can be two roadmaps, two different ideas or ways of getting to the skill of creativity, but I argue that AI is genuinely one of them. And also to further bolster my points, um, originality has been discussed to not be creating one from nil. Um, I think it was Mark Twain who, and I've got I've got this here, that all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously, drawn from a million outside sources. So I think that I'll use my point that AI creativity is genuine because it follows the same process, the same ways of thinking, ways of working that humans create. We don't think of an idea from nothing, we put together past experiences, blend them together and learn, and sort of predict or gen or generate new ideas or outputs in the same way that generative AI does.

SPEAKER_09 41:27

Okay, thank you. Thank you, Helian. Okay, so you've heard you've um as everyone, you've heard Abdul and Halyan there, clause team one, and um we heard uh obviously Fumi and Sajuda clause uh at team two. Well now that is the debate with a line. We're now gonna open up to the floor. If anybody's got any questions they want to pose to either team, tell me which team it is, um, pop it in chat and or um speak.

SPEAKER_08 42:02

Yeah, speak.

SPEAKER_09 42:02

Yeah, you can raise your hand, I'll call you in. So we have got a good a good few minutes now. If anybody from the audience wants to come in and throw a curveball question at either team, please do. Uh yes, David.

SPEAKER_01 42:22

Okay, thank you very much. Uh, that was a very interesting debate. I've just got a very simple question to ask both teams. Uh, how do you think human knowledge is organized or curated? And how does that difference to how AI curates its own knowledge?

SPEAKER_09 42:43

So say that one more time for me, David. So, how do you think the knowledge is?

SPEAKER_01 42:47

Yeah, I said how do you think human knowledge is curated? Okay, human knowledge is created. Yeah, how do we come about what we currently know right now as humans? And how do you think AI is doing the same with what it currently knows right now?

SPEAKER_09 43:02

Thank you very much. So, yeah, how do we think human knowledge is created and put together and how the difference is between how we do it and how AI is currently doing it in the moment? Letitia, you've got your hand up on this one. Throw yourself in. Please do. This is Team Two's response.

SPEAKER_03 43:16

Yeah, and I'll just give the first half of our response and let's say you finish it off for me.

SPEAKER_09 43:20

Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 43:21

But um I think this really feeds into our point really well. It's a good question in that humans learn things and get new knowledge eventually over time in a social situation, in society, with emotions and other things going on. This is different from a computer getting all the data it can fed into it. I know it's not the same as having data in a database, but a computer getting millions and millions of pieces of data fed into it all at once is inherently different from a human who learns and grows over time and then puts that into their creation. Creativity. And I'll pass over to Saiju now.

SPEAKER_08 44:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 44:05

Yes, just leading on from what you should say. So it's actually a good question for us on our on our debate. So humans create knowledge in my perspective through conscious and a selective process. So what we know as of today comes from lived experiences, like there's cultural context involved, you know, there's disagreements, there's there's a refinement over time of ethics, even. So we don't just absorb uh information, we evaluate it, we decide what's true, what's mat what matter matters to the situation, and we decide whether to discard disregard it or keep it, you know. So knowledge is shaped, human knowledge is shaped over time, I feel, um, and there's judgment involved. But in terms of AI, how AI curates knowledge, it doesn't really curate knowledge in a sense, it just aggregates and predicts patterns from the data, and and it doesn't really break new knowledge as such, it doesn't know what's true or false, it doesn't understand context behind what you're asking, uh, and it cannot make value judgments, you know. There's no conscious involved, hence why it's different.

SPEAKER_09 45:10

Thank you, Zen. Um I think Holly Ann, you had your hand up obviously first. So, Holly Ann, if you can come in with me, just have about 30 seconds, and then I'll flick over to Abdul.

SPEAKER_04 45:21

Sure. Um, well, I'm not really too well versed on this, but I would like to answer the way in uh I see this. I would say that human knowledge is is organized and stored with a different couple of types. You have got experiences, you've got um different sensory uh memories. Um, I don't know what different types of memories are, I know but are different types, but you've got that. And I would argue it's stored in a network of information stored in your stored in your brain. And I would like to point out that uh for language learning models and deep learning, I believe it is, the way they learn is that uh they learn via neural networks that were designed to mimic the same structure of the human brain. So again, I'll argue that creativity follows that same process.

SPEAKER_07 46:13

Right.

SPEAKER_04 46:14

Thank you.

SPEAKER_09 46:16

So Abdul Yep.

SPEAKER_07 46:17

Yeah, thank you, Holly, and and uh thank you, Letitia and Saju. Uh your point is 100% right. Uh, human learns by exposed to our surroundings, right? Our languages, the books that we read, the teaching that we have, our culture, the mistakes that we make, and the practice that we do, right? The feedback that we get from our surroundings, the people that we're exposed to. And this information is then curated by society's school editors, mentors, or communities, our parents. Um, so the pattern is that we do not memorize everything, right? We generalize from it and then produce new thoughts and expressions based upon those experiences, right? Now, exactly the same or very, very, very similar is AI. Now, AI systems are trained on large curated data sets that have been specifically selected and then weighed, right, and then filtered by humans. And then during the training, the system doesn't just store all this information and then peck at it whenever it needs to, or whenever it's asked to by Sam. It learns from statistical patterns, right, and relationship across the data, i.e., Holly Ant's point, their neural networks, and then it models them into parameters exactly the same way that humans have decision making, right? It's within the parameters of the AI, and then it generates new outputs based off of those parameters, right? So the key difference is isn't whether knowledge is stored, it's how, right? Humans store through lived experiences and social learning, and AI stores through data pipelines and optimization. In both cases, creativity comes from that word again, recombining learned patterns into something that is new, a new decision, a learned way of thinking.

SPEAKER_09 48:15

Thank you very much, Adam. Um if you would we've got about a minute gonna, if you want to add um before we stop and wrap up.

SPEAKER_05 48:25

Yeah, I'll be very quick. So I just want to directly fire back from what um was said from team two, and that is the fact that the human brain cannot physically take in a massive amount of information. Therefore, you could even say, um, if it did, it would be considered cognitive overload, which can cause stress on the human body and the brain. Therefore, you can even argue that creativity can be more generated from AI because it has a lot more inferences, just like humans do, and this has already been scientifically proven by Samuel Chaparro and his colleagues in 2025, but they did a blind experiment. They had AI versus human creativity, and the people chose AI over human. Also, just like us as human beings, we were originally babies and we could not tell right from wrong. We had to be taught that by our parents and by our environment and by our experiences, in the same way that AI is constantly learning, because it's also learning from our inferences about what is right and wrong from what we've learned from other people as well, as well as from its own experiences and the input interactions or the information it gathers. So, in that sense, AI and human is alike.

SPEAKER_09 49:36

Okay, thank you. So we are now coming to the end. So sorry, Sandrew. Um, I'm gonna I'm gonna close the uh close the debate and a bit of a thank you very much for that question. Um, I think David, it was really good, got some further responses from from the teams there. Um so I'm gonna say thank you very much for uh both participants there and um dealing with me kind of flicking it back and forward, which is always fun. Um we're gonna I do believe that Keith's gonna put a poll in the chat.

SPEAKER_08 50:07

Um yep, so just gonna put a poll. Hopefully, this works. So I'm just gonna launch it. So obviously, everyone, apart from the host and the participants, if you can vote on who gave the most compelling argument. There you go.

SPEAKER_09 50:25

So the poll's popped up. If you are part of the panel, you can't vote for yourself. Um, so has that by the way? Do we not vote? Uh you you don't because you were part of the panel. Um because everyone will vote for themselves. So team one, obviously Ghana, Holly Ann and Abdul. Um, but they were obviously arguing their uh AI creativity is genuine, and team two for me Letitia and uh Saju uh were arguing that it's just sophisticated plaguerism.

SPEAKER_01 50:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_08 50:58

So submit your if you think it is, and hit okay, so just another minute or 30 seconds, and then we're gonna review the results.

unknown 51:18

Okay.

SPEAKER_08 51:23

So I'm gonna close the poll now. So last couple of seconds. And three, two, one. Gonna close the poll. Wow. 52% for team two and 48. That was close. That was very, very close. Fantastic. I mean, that was amazing for everyone taking part. You did a great job. Um, we've got our Dean on Cassie. Um, did you want to close the sh close the event?

SPEAKER_00 51:59

Yeah, I'd love to. Um, so firstly, just to say a huge congratulations to all of our participants who gave such compelling arguments that I think you could see by how close the voters, um, that you know, really you could kind of call it a draw, uh, even if we do have to have a winner. And I think there's a degree of like nobody really wants to think that human creativity can be overtaken by AI. So I do think you put a really, really good case together, team one, uh, just to be pipped at the post there. It's kind of like our own Brexit vote, there, isn't it? Um, by team two. But seriously, I am wowed by how impressive all of you are. I mean, you clearly know your stuff, you're so passionate about this topic, and you spoke so articulately and eloquently about it that you know I kind of feel like you could come and be a guest tutor. Um, so well done, all of you. And yeah, I hope everybody in the audience enjoyed it. This has been a passion project of mine for some time now to get these debates up and running. So I think, albeit I'm very biased, that this was a huge success, and I definitely would love to do it again. Um, and hopefully you do feel the same. But please do feedback to Keith if you do have any comments. Also, just quickly, I want to thank my team, uh, so Keat for putting this together, and um, of course, Scott, our host with the most. So nice to see you back, Scott, and thank you for doing a really good job.