Can an AI be creative?

Go back to [[Week 4 - Introduction]] or see [[Autogeneration of news content]]

Margaret Boden on AI’s relationship to creativity

Creativity has been a major interest of yours. Do you see AI as a means of unleashing creativity or as a way of enabling us to understand human creativity?

I’m interested in how computational technology can help us understand human creativity. Many examples of creativity involve learning and exploring in a hierarchical style. Neural and multilayer network systems can help us construct different frameworks to better understand those hierarchies, but there’s much more to learn and discover. If you have a computer that comes up with random combinations of musical notes, most of that stuff will be utterly uninteresting rubbish, but some of it will not be. A human being who has sufficient insight and time could well pick up an idea or two. A gifted artist, on the other hand, might hear the same random compilation and come away with a completely novel idea, one that sparks a totally new form of composition. That’s a very different type of creativity. About 95% of what professional artists and scientists do is either exploratory or combinational, and the other 5% is transformational creativity. At the moment, we don’t really have a good understanding of these processes. That’s where AI has the potential to play a powerful role.

Also see [[We just don’t understand understanding]]

What’s next for AI - Margaret Boden. (2015, September 11). IBM Cognitive Advantage Reports. http://www.ibm.com/watson/advantage-reports/future-of-artificial-intelligence/margaret-boden.html