REVIEW 4 major objections 3 minor 31 references
Creative Loss: Ambiguity, Uncertainty and Indeterminacy
T0 review · 4 major / 3 minor · reviewed 2026-08-11 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read Machine learning's most distinctive creative quality is indeterminacy, found in the half-trained spaces of trained models.
desk verdict Useful taxonomy wrapped around an unsupported central hypothesis; the essay is worth reading but needs to reframe its main claim as a research program. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The central object is the latent space, the internal learned representation of a generative model in which each point maps to an output. The key move is to read that space as unevenly trained: an incremental, statistically learned whole with margins of indeterminacy, a concept the paper borrows from the philosophy of technical objects. This reading carries the argument because it turns indeterminacy from a property of an artwork into a property of the model itself that can in principle be measured, controlled, and calibrated against the structure of the training data.
What would settle it
A direct test would train a generative model on a fixed dataset, measure per-region training quality in the latent space using indicators such as reconstruction error, discriminator confidence, or interpolation smoothness, then generate outputs from the least-trained, half-trained, and fully trained regions and have independent evaluators judge creativity. The paper's claim is falsified if outputs from the best-trained regions are consistently rated as creative as or more creative than those from the half-trained regions, or if the measured training variation across the space is negligible.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
A neural network's latent space is usually treated as a uniform, fully trained instrument, but the paper claims this is false: because training is incremental and driven by an overall loss, different regions of the latent space are trained to different degrees and with different degrees of determination. Indeterminacy is precisely this incompleteness, and it is what gives machine learning its own creative potential, distinct from the ambiguity of hallucinated or dream-like outputs and the probabilistic uncertainty of transformer sampling. The paper therefore proposes that future creative machine learning should not only minimize loss but deliberately control and calibrate indeterminacy, working in the spaces of the half-trained and half-determinate, and may even construct datasets rather than only curate them in order to exploit this quality.
Load-bearing premise
The claim rests on the factual assumption that latent spaces are not uniformly trained but vary in degree of training and determination; if standard training actually produces effectively uniform latent spaces, or if that unevenness has no stable relationship to creative quality, the proposed direction loses its foundation.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- Creative machine learning should deliberately search for outcomes in partially trained latent regions instead of treating final loss minimization as the sole objective.
- Semi-supervised learning and synthetic data become tools for shaping how much of the latent space is determined, rather than merely ways to improve accuracy.
- The three-term distinction gives designers a precise vocabulary: ambiguity aligns with combinatorial creativity, uncertainty with exploratory probability, and indeterminacy with transformative change.
- Indeterminacy suggests a transductive potential between modalities, such as drawing and music, where the unevenly trained space itself becomes a site for creative translation.
Reading between the lines
- A concrete test follows from the paper's claim: train two generative models on the same data to different numbers of epochs, or with loss unevenly weighted across the latent space, then compare outputs from differently trained regions; the claim predicts that the half-trained regions will not merely be worse but will show a distinct kind of creative value. The paper does not run this test.
- The argument implicitly points toward a broader research direction: treating neural network training as a developmental or annealing process in which final performance and creative affordance may pull in different directions, so that training schedules become creative parameters in their own right.
- Read operationally, the claim suggests a new evaluation criterion for creative AI: instead of judging only the outputs, one could measure the heterogeneity of training across the latent space, for example through per-region reconstruction error or discriminator confidence, and ask whether that heterogeneity correlates with judged creativity. The paper gestures at this but does not formalize it.
Signed reviews
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper proposes a conceptual framework for evaluating creative uses of machine learning, distinguishing ambiguity, uncertainty, and indeterminacy. It maps these onto Boden's combination, exploration, and transformation, and argues that indeterminacy—understood as a property of latent-space formation—is the most distinctive creative quality of machine learning. The argument is illustrated with three projects from the author's Unit 21 at the Bartlett: AI Wabi-sabi (ambiguity), Probobli Boboli and related works (uncertainty), and a programmatic call for 'half-trained' latent spaces (indeterminacy). The paper concludes with ethical remarks and suggestions for future research.
Significance. If the central premise about uneven training of latent spaces were established, the paper would give the creative-AI community a novel research direction beyond minimizing final loss and would offer a useful vocabulary for discussing degrees of creativity. The practice-based illustrations and the ethical emphasis on dataset authorship are strengths. However, as it stands, the key claim is a speculation with no supporting evidence, mechanism, or empirical comparison, which limits the paper's current contribution to that of a provocative essay rather than a substantiated research direction.
major comments (4)
- [Section 4, second paragraph] The claim 'Space is not evenly or uniformly trained, but instead achieves its variation and hybridity due to differing degrees of training and determination' is load-bearing for the recommendation to seek creative outcomes in 'half-trained' spaces, yet it is asserted without evidence or argument. In standard GAN and VAE training, gradient descent updates the shared weights globally; a given latent coordinate is not a 'trained' object in any local sense. Non-uniformities that arise in latent space are typically attributable to data density, prior mismatch, or conditioning, not to variation in the amount of training applied to different regions. Unless one of these mechanisms is intended, the premise does not follow from the cited models. Please provide a mechanism or reference that supports the claim, or substantially soften the claim into an explicit speculation.
- [Section 4, last sentence] The phrase 'the spaces of the half-trained and half-determinate' conflates the temporal training trajectory with spatial structure. A model early in training has an under-fit latent space, but that is a global property of the checkpoint, not a region that remains 'half-trained' after convergence. If the intended meaning is early-stopped checkpoints, intermediate training epochs, or regions of low data density, that should be stated explicitly; the current phrasing suggests a spatial localization that standard training dynamics do not produce.
- [Section 5, first paragraph] The alignment of ambiguity, uncertainty, and indeterminacy with Boden's combination, exploration, and transformation is asserted in a single sentence ('It could be argued...') without supporting argument. This mapping is the paper's main conceptual contribution and should be defended. In particular, Boden's transformation requires changing the defining dimensions of the conceptual space, which is not obviously what is meant by 'indeterminacy' in latent spaces. The paper should explain how the mapping works rather than leaving it as a suggestion.
- [Sections 2 and 4] The conclusion that indeterminacy is the most distinctive quality is partly predetermined by the definitions. Ambiguity is characterized from the start as 'imitation' that 'reinforces the corpus' (Section 2), whereas indeterminacy is characterized as 'testing the limits of ontology' (Section 4). Given these choices, the ranking is a foregone conclusion. The paper should either justify those characterizations against plausible alternatives or acknowledge that the ranking is a definitional framing rather than an empirical finding.
minor comments (3)
- [References, [31]] Reference [31] contains a typographical error: 'F ormalized music' should read 'Formalized music'.
- [Section 2 and Figure captions] The project name is rendered inconsistently as 'AI Wabi-sabi' and 'AI wabi-sabi' in the text and in the figure captions; please standardize the capitalization.
- [Section 4, first paragraph] The section introduces two senses of indeterminacy (the meta-communicative frame from Bateson and Hertzmann, and the measurable 'constituent part' sense). The transition between these senses is abrupt; a sentence explicitly distinguishing them would improve clarity.
Circularity Check
Indeterminacy's unique status is baked into its definition; the latent-space claim is unsupported but not circular.
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self definitional
[Section 4 and Section 5 (Conclusion)]
"To create with indeterminacy is to not just suspend meaning, but test the limits of ontology. ... It could be argued ambiguity, uncertainty and indeterminacy respectively align with these approaches. ... Indeterminacy emerges as far more unique quality within machine learning."
The evaluative conclusion that indeterminacy is the most transformative or unique quality is already contained in the stipulative definition of indeterminacy as testing the limits of ontology. Ambiguity is characterized as corpus-reinforcing imitation and uncertainty as probabilism within an overall system of certainties, so the ranking among the three terms is fixed by the definitions rather than by an independent argument. The conclusion then restates this definition ('moving beyond the assumption that training and data must solely emulate established environmental patterns') instead of deriving it from evidence. This is a persuasive-definition ordering: the conclusion follows by construction from the way the terms are introduced.
full rationale
This is a conceptual essay rather than a formal derivation, so most of the claimed progression is rhetorical rather than mathematical. The one genuinely circular move is the pre-ordering of the three concepts: ambiguity is defined as imitation that reinforces the corpus, uncertainty as operating inside an established system of probabilities, and indeterminacy as testing the limits of ontology. The conclusion that indeterminacy aligns with Boden's 'transformation' and is 'far more unique' therefore follows by stipulation, not by independent evidence. The separate load-bearing claim in Section 4 that latent space is 'not evenly or uniformly trained' and that 'half-trained' regions are the most creative is not derived from anything; it is an unsupported empirical/interpretive premise. That is a correctness or evidence problem, not a circularity, because the claim is not an input to itself. The self-references to the author's own studio projects are illustrative rather than evidential, so they do not constitute load-bearing self-citation. No equations or fitted parameters are involved. Overall, one self-definitional step partially determines the central evaluative conclusion, but the latent-space proposal retains independent content, supporting a moderate score of 4.
Assumptions & free parameters
assumptions (3)
- domain assumption The three terms map cleanly to phenomenology, epistemology, and ontology.
- domain assumption Latent space is not evenly or uniformly trained, and variation arises from differing degrees of training and determination.
- ad hoc to paper Ambiguity, uncertainty, and indeterminacy align respectively with Boden's combination, exploration, and transformation.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Creative Loss: Ambiguity, Uncertainty and Indeterminacy." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/LJO6MEPJ
@misc{pith2026250110369,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Creative Loss: Ambiguity, Uncertainty and Indeterminacy},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/LJO6MEPJ}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2501.10369}
}
read the original abstract
This article evaluates how creative uses of machine learning can address three adjacent terms: ambiguity, uncertainty and indeterminacy. Through the progression of these concepts it reflects on increasing ambitions for machine learning as a creative partner, illustrated with research from Unit 21 at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Through indeterminacy are potential future approaches to machine learning and design.
Figures
Figures from the paper (4 more)
Reference graph
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Reviewed August 11, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
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