The Astronomical Math of Creativity (And its implications for AI)

How many novels are possible? How many songs? How many images? The numbers are many orders of magnitude beyond human comprehension. And this is a great thing for human artists.

Yes, I use AI as a co-writer. No, I’ve moved away from using AI to draft anything here on Substack, with the exception of the definition call-outs that I frequently use in my posts. The reason is because, quite simply, Claude is a better wordsmith than I’ll ever be. It has a perspicacious way with words, as, after all, it’s a language model. Because of this, it’s better at writing high-precision tidbits, but will never really capture my narrative voice.

I also use generative AI for image generation, though I never pass it off as art, it is merely instrumental for these articles and my YouTube videos. More recently, I started generating music on Suno, including some anthems that I listen to on repeat.

Below is one of my favorite songs of all time, which I generated with the help of Claude and Suno, plus the artwork is generated by Midjourney.

The Eschaton is a mythic piece that fuses the archetype of death with the end of existence. In other words, death is the eschaton made personal—the end of your universe is, archetypally, no different from the end of all things for everyone. In other words, religious eschatological stories, from the book of Revelations to Norse Ragnarök, are really just the personal experience of death made universal.

But I digress.

One day recently, as I was drafting Pariah’s Claim, the sequel to my debut novel Heavy Silver, I was curious, “How many novels can possibly be written?” So I headed over to ChatGPT to use o1-preview to see if we could estimate that number.

At first, the chatbot merely estimated how many combinations of words you could stuff into a 50,000 word sequence. This number is absurdly large, but the vast majority of those word sequences would be utter gibberish.

Even how if purple quickly arcane hijinks monkey?

Okay, so you need to constrain this search space by using several rules and heuristics. Each sentence needs to be grammatically and semantically sound, for starters. But then each chapter has to be coherent, and the overall arc of the book needs to make sense. Then there are genre conventions and best practices.

Without boring you with the math, I ran this problem by ChatGPT several times as well as some Claude-powered agents, and we reliably end up in the realm of 10^100,000 possible meaningful novels. That is a 1 followed by 100,000 zeros.

To give you an idea of how absurdly astronomical that number is, there are about 10^80 atoms in the observable universe. This is a Douglass Adams level of absurdity.

Even when we went to maximally conservative constraints, we ended up at around 10^1,000 possible novels that can be written and also be meaningful and good. To put this into perspective, if you read one novel per day, on average, it would take you one hundred trillion times the age of the universe to even make it through that TBR pile.

ChatGPT even adds some flourish when describing the mindboggling nature of these numbers. It once stated that “every planet in the universe could be fully populated by humans writing every day, and it would still take many lifetimes of the universe to produce every meaningful novel.”

Therefore, I have personally concluded that AI in no way detracts from the value of human creativity where novel writing is concerned. Even if we had the rest of eternity, AI will still not help us write every possible novel, let alone every possible amazing novel. The sheer stupidity of the mathematical volume of potential great works of fiction is so mindbogglingly idiotic that it really is impossible for us to contemplate.

Instead, my personal view is that AI merely acts as an accelerant, it helps us realize novels more quickly, taking days, weeks, and months, instead of years. Even at that rate, it is inconceivable that humanity will ever produce every possible great work. Furthermore, the vast possibility space that novels represent mean that, even with the help of AI and nearly identical prompts, no two novels will ever come out the same. The emergent space of linguistic creativity is utterly indomitable, AI or no.

But what about visual art and music?

ChatGPT and I took a stab at this. Looking at the total number of possible images that can be generated is somewhere between 10^1,000 and 10^300,000 depending on how you estimate it. ChatGPT took into consideration the fact that you can change one pixel in an image without making an appreciable difference in its meaning or value, so it instead looked at more abstracted representations, entropic representations, and complexity theory. Either way, I won’t bore you anymore with the mathematical details, but suffice to say, the space of possible images is in the same scale as the space of possible novels, and no human could ever possibly hope to even look at all those images, let alone generate them.

Music is a bit more constrained for similar reasons, such as musical conventions, the structured nature of music, and the fact that songs are pretty short. ChatGPT estimates that there are about 10^5,000 possible songs that we can write, generate, play, and sing. Even so, this number is many orders of magnitude beyond what the entire human race could hope to consume in a trillion lifetimes of the universe.

The long story short is this: in my eyes, AI represents a negligible threat to human creativity. It merely accelerates the process, and even if the majority of media, art, TV, music, and movies are soon generated by AI, on demand, it is numerically impossible for AI to write your novel. Only you can. As I’m writing Pariah’s Claim and a prequel for the fan favorite of my stories, Cannetia Drake, I am constantly reminded that it is statistically never going to occur that, even with an unlimited budget and perfect AI, Netflix might produce my story as I want to tell it.

Even if Spotify created automated music generation playlists, in a billion universes, it might never generate my song The Eschaton as I realized it.

Consider this: there is already more music, film, TV, and art than you can possibly appreciate in a lifetime. And that’s without AI. The vast sea of creativity possibility beckons. Even before the stars all gutter and die, one by one, we won’t even make an appreciable dent in the totality of creative space.

God damn it’s a good time to be an artist.