Humans are capable of original thought and ideas, AI can't create like that, it needs input.
AI can do pretty much the same thing human can.
And btw - human also need inputs, every mental process start with a stimuli. And if you think about autonomous operation - generative AI was made explicictly to be so, they work as a human artist on a job - provide picture when asked, it's a choice by their creators (because no one really care about random picture from AI).
There are also fully autnomous AI, in CCTV for example. Even for generative AI I bet there are some AI that constatntly monitor news, summarize them, make an analysis and provide signals for trading (there were robots for that way before AI and gAI should certainly improve quality).
The full glass example was just to show the lacking ability of AI and how it clearly only has the ability to pull from what's been put into it.
And while there may be some examples that are similar when it comes to a level of misunderstanding, it's not the same. A human could easily create this image.
It's all depends on prior knowledge and education. Humans has a wider, more diverse range of concepts with more complex structure. But it's a matter of education and prior knowledge - as AI continue to evolve it will learn more and more concepts and more complex structures of them. And btw - AI can now picture full glass.
And again - it was proven that if human ever see only a half-filled glass, it would also treat it as only possible choice. It's how human brain operates. And asking some poor kid from the jungles of Africa to picture full glass of wine will yield you nothing as he will have no concepts of neither glass nor wine.
Sure there are lots of examples where humans just iterate on existing ideas, but those ideas had to come from somewhere. AI can't do that.
Your other example of using AI to streamline searches or workloads isn't a creative process.
This ideas where created by the same iteration search or by some pure chance.
You can't create something from nothing, humans can't even create a ~random~ bullshit as human brain are very weak with random, all they create are some cliche distribution that percieved one but not random in reality.
Same with creation - you just blend things you already know, and those come either from real-world or from other similary created concepts, until you find someone workable that will be an original (really no so) new concept.
Take a look at rogue-like for example. It comes from Rogue - one of the first roleplaying videogames. It comes from times when concept of "game death" being not so serious was yet to be invented/take a mass traction, so it follows table games rules, and those follows real roleplay aka playing a role as if it was real. And in reality if you die - it's an end. Nothing original here and in games it add novelty just because everyone forgotten about that and in games everyone got used to non-penalty deaths that realism was pushed to sidelines.
