I think creativity and AI is one of those topics that can fuel a lifetime of research.
How do we study AI creativity without anthropomorphising?
What happens when creative agents develop own evaluation criteria?
What would genuine AI authorship look like legally/culturally?
What is the New Rarity?
I wrote Designing Imperfection in 2005, In glitch aesthetics, me and Ant Scott thought that making it into a coffee table book was the way to popularise and legitimise what was a nascent movement.
It was published by Thames and Hudson, Sept 9th, 2009. I vowed never to do that again, well. 20 years, is a long time to reconsider it.
If I was writing a book, I’d certainly be covering those topics.
Take for instance our notions of human creativity, they are limited to a time when machine creativity wasn’t capable.
To take AI and creativity seriously, requires us to confront our own definitions and the uncomfortable possibility that creativity isn’t uniquely human.
Most classic models of creativity I’ve come across converge on three core criteria:
1. Originality – Is it novel?
2. Value – Is it useful or meaningful?
3. Surprise – Does it defy expectations?
We should be at the point where we can begin to define machine creativity separately from human or organic creativity, without defaulting to denial or undeserved superiority. We need to define AI creativity on its own terms and develop new metrics.
This weekend I started re-reading “The Creative Mind” by Margaret Boden, one of her amazing books in which she essentially argues that creativity isn’t magic, it’s a process.
And that process can, in parts, be modeled by machines.
There’s deep human hubris in assuming creativity belongs only to us. Animals, machines, automata can all be creative. There’s a deep human hubris in assuming creativity belongs only to us. Animals, machines, even automata can exhibit creativity. Reconsidering her Lovelace questions today, in light of what we’ve now built, feels like stepping into a new chapter of that very argument.
So this is my new blog, consciously creative.