Are Generative AIs like Midjourney and Sora creative? The “Generative AI Mary’s room” thought experiment.

This article examines the debate of whether generative AI systems like Midjourney and Sora can be considered truly creative or are merely remixing existing data. It reviews Finke, Ward, and Smith's creative cognition approach which proposed constraints on human creativity. A new thought experiment, the "Generative AI Mary's Room", is proposed to explore whether a person with comprehensive artistic knowledge but no real-world experience could produce original creative works. The argument is that one who believes generative AI is not creative because it works based solely on previous artistic data, should not believe that Mary would be creative either, otherwise, they are inferring mysterious properties to the human mind.