 CONTENTS

Chapter no Description Page no.

Introduction

 CHAPTER 1 Background & evolution of PAGE 5

computational creativity

 CHAPTER 2 The Computer as Creative PAGE6

Agent

 CHAPTER 3 The Computer as Creative PAGE 7

Instrument

 CHAPTER 4 Recent computational approaches PAGE9

to creativity

 CHAPTER 5 Real-world applications PAGE 12

 Abstract

Computers have enhanced productivity and cost-effectiveness in all of the creative

industries, and their value as tools is rarely doubted. But can machines serve as more than
mere tools, and assume the role and responsibilities of a co-creative partner, or even become
goal-setting, autonomous creators in their own right? These are the questions that define the
discipline of computational creativity. The answers require an algorithmic understanding of
how humans give meaning to form, but a transformation in the way we think about creativity
is unlikely to occur in a single bound. Rather, interdisciplinary insights from diverse fields
must first inform our models, and shape a narrative of creativity in which machines are both
tools and creators. To set the stage for the newest work, this introduction to the special issue
on computational creativity shows where the field is going, and where it has come from.

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 Introduction

The historical sweep of human innovation has rarely been captured so concisely as in
Stanley Kubrick’s film, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. In what it is perhaps the most dramatic
jump cut in all of cinema, Kubrick cuts from a tumbling bone, recently weaponized by an
ancient hominid at the vanguard of an evolutionary leap, to a gently orbiting space station of
the future. In doing so, he captures an essential truth about creativity: creators rely crucially
on their tools, and so, the steady evolution of human creativity has occurred in lockstep with
a parallel evolution in human tools. Whether our tools are used for good or ill, they make
something possible that was previously difficult or impractical to achieve. As we embed ever
more of our creative processes into our tools, these processes—as well as our notions of
creativity itself—are also free to grow and evolve. Therefore, we now find ourselves, albeit
decades behind schedule, at a similarly transformative juncture in human creativity as
imagined in Kubrick’s film: for we now transfer so much of the creative burden onto our
computers and software systems that our tools may soon deserve to be viewed as creative
agents in their own right.

We must thus consider the creative role of computers from a dual perspective: the machine
as an instrument of human creativity and the machine as an agent of its own creativity.
Despite advances in Artificial Intelligence, the instrumental view remains dominant, as,
ironically, such advances can lead us to prize those areas in which we humans still excel,
such as art and science, and to see them as a distinctly human preserve. However,
Computational Creativity is an emerging field at the nexus of artificial intelligence (AI),
cognitive science, art, design, and philosophy, which sees creativity as a fundamentally
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algorithmic activity, one that computers can pursue autonomously or semi-autonomously,
not as tools but as creators and co-creative partners. In this way, this new field, called CC for
short, aims to bridge the competing viewpoints by showing how tools may evolve into tool
users, and thus realize Countess Ada Lovelace’s hopes for a poetical science.

CHAPTER 1:

• Background & evolution of computational creativity

Tracing the roots and historical underpinnings of computational creativity, one is immersed
in a timeline marked by pioneering endeavors to bridge the realms of AI and creativity. The
emergence of computational creativity can be attributed to the quest for imbuing machines
with the capacity to think divergently and produce novel, imaginative outputs, thus
propelling the evolution of AI beyond conventional problem-solving frameworks.

• Significance of computational creativity

The concept of computational creativity assumes a pivotal role in the AI landscape,

heralding a paradigm shift in the very essence of machine capabilities. Its unparalleled
significance lies in its potential to engender transformative advancements across diverse
domains, including art, design, literature, music, and innovation, thereby enriching human-
machine interaction with a fusion of creativity and innovation.

• How computational creativity works

The operational mechanics of computational creativity are underpinned by a tapestry of

intricate components that mimic human cognitive processes. The amalgamation of pattern
recognition, data synthesis, and autonomous decision-making engenders an environment
conducive to generating outputs that resonate with artistic and imaginative characteristics,
fostering a harmonious coexistence of technology and creativity within AI.

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CHAPTER 2:

The Computer as Creative Agent

Like AI, CC is both an engineering discipline and a philosophical stance. It aims to shed
light on human creativity by treating the mind as an embodied information-processing
machine, but it also sets out to give algorithmic form to psychological findings about the
workings of creativity in humans. For practical purposes, it does not seek to define
‘creativity’ itself, as moving targets rarely offer reliable directions, but assumes the folk,
human-centric notion of common parlance, with all its cultural and historical baggage. As AI
researchers once did for intelligence, strong CC researchers seek to endow machines with the
ability to achieve ends that would be deemed creative if achieved by humans, perhaps in
ways that would be equally to the credit of a human. These ends are more generative than
analytical, as CC emphasizes the creation of novel digital artefacts in various modalities,
whether text (e.g., poems, stories, jokes, lyrics), image (e.g., paintings, designs, fonts, logos),
or sound (music, speech), as well as multimodal artefacts that integrate all three (e.g.,
computer games, interactive fiction). Human assessments of these artefacts offer an
empirical yardstick for the methods and theories that guide their construction, though CC
researchers are careful to resist calls for a creative Turing Test in which humans are asked to
discern the synthetic from the handmade. Turing’s test, now a staple of pop culture,
promotes a race to the surface, pushing engineers to use guile rather than theory to fool the
eye and the ear. This point deserves italics: Strong CC does not set out to fool humans but to
better understand human creativity, by turning formal ideas of novelty and value into
working algorithms and new artefacts.

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CHAPTER 3:

The Computer as Creative Instrument

Human creativity in the digital age is increasingly facilitated by richly featured software
tools that support rapid experimentation via trial-and-error, and the growing market for
creativity support tools has not gone unnoticed by the field of creativity research . Where
once an artist might doodle in a notebook, painters like David Hockney now extoll the
virtues of the digital tablet. For decades, designers have used professional CAD (computer-
aided design) tools to design everything from cars to buildings, but the distinction between
professional- and consumer-grade tools is now blurring with significant increases in the
power, and dramatic decreases in the cost, of personal devices. Smartphones with all the
functionality of a laptop computer come complete with in-built cameras and audio
capabilities as standard, creating a market for casual creativity on the go. When users are
empowered to create and share content via a multitude of apps, the market incentivizes
developers to provide more advanced tools for filtering, editing, and generally transforming
reality as mediated by our digital devices. Yet, not all modalities are equal. Most
smartphones offer tools for the manipulation of sounds, images, and video, with capabilities
that were once the preserve of professional studios. Yet, it says something about the brittle
nature of language that comparable consumer-grade tools have not yet been developed for
the creation, and co-creation, of novel texts.

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Indeed, creativity support tools for writers have made little headway beyond digitalized
versions of old reliable such as the thesaurus, the style guide, and the grammar book. These
tools suggest word substitutions or changes in word order, but rarely help writers to be more
creative, by suggesting edits that would make a text wittier, more persuasive, or more
memorable. To be sure, image-editing tools are just that, tools, and have no creativity of their
own. Nonetheless, such tools—comparable applications exist for audio and video too—offer
a broad palette of features to encourage creative experimentation via cycles of rapid
generation and facile manipulation of novel forms. By comparison, our productivity tools for
text creation offer a much-impoverished slate of features. This is changing, with the advent
of web-scale language models that can be repurposed for a wide range of language
generation tasks. Yet, the tool perspective, or what we might call the ‘weak CC’ stance, is
still capable of generating insights into the nature of human creativity. The availability of
tools and their relative capabilities across modalities tells us something of value about what,
how, and why we humans create. To go deeper still, we will need to explore truly
autonomous machine creativity, or what we can call the ‘strong CC’ stance.

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CHAPTER :4

Recent computational approaches to creativity

Models of divergent creativity

Divergent thinking has been related to associative thinking and can be modeled as spreading
activity in neural networks. Three recent publications used a network science approach to
study how individual differences in creative associative thinking might arise from structural
differences in semantic networks Findings suggested that the semantic networks of highly
creative individuals showed more small-world properties, which allows for faster search over
a wider network of associations, increasing the probability of returning novel associations
Kenett et al. also found that breaking associations in a simulated semantic network led to
larger parts of the network breaking apart in low creative individuals, while networks in high
creative individuals remained fairly intact. This network science computational approach
thus suggests that structural characteristics of semantic networks influence the extent of
divergent thinking.

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Another recent approach implemented a computational model of a popular task to study
divergent creativity, the Alternative Uses Task . In the AUT, individuals produce as many as
possible alternative uses for a common object (e.g. towel, brick) within limited time. In the
model, performance on this task relies on object replacement and object composition
(OROC). The system was modeled within a theoretical framework called CreaCogs .
CreaCogs-OROC organizes memory into three layers: first, a sub symbolic level where
feature spaces (e.g. shape, color, affordance) of objects are represented in a distributed
fashion; second, a level of concepts grounded in the sub symbolic level; and third, a problem
template level representing known problems and solutions encoded over concepts and
relations between them .Each level is grounded in the subordinate level to be able to use, say,
features from related concepts to find objects with features that can replace a cue object in
the AUT, or vice versa. The more feature spaces are considered, the more divergent the
search for a replacement use can become, making the divergence of search in the AUT-
dependent on the size and number of feature spaces in the CreaCogs-OROC knowledge base
— a possible source of interindividual differences. Simulations of the AUT in CreaCogs-
OROC show that the system can produce answers comparable to findings in humans

Figure 1. The knowledge base in Creacogs-OROC comprises three levels over which objects
are encoded. Each level is grounded in the level below it. The distributed nature of the
feature space level might offer dual-states modeling as a unitary approach as suggested by
Hommel and Wiers

Prognosis and Conclusions

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The usefulness of computers as tools for the furtherance of human innovation is well attested
by their widespread adoption by the creative industries. Modern software tools do much
more than the uninspired drudgework of creativity, and work hand-in-glove with creators to
drive innovations that might not be feasible or cost-effective by either working alone [43].
Where machines excel is in the exploration of large state spaces, such as those that
correspond to the most divergent of problems [20], which is to say, problems that benefit
from casting the widest possible net in the search for solutions, or from using multiple
metrics to assess novelty and value. We are already halfway to viewing computers not as
drudges and mere tools but as partners in the creative act [24]. At present, this partnership
assigns creative responsibilities on the basis of comparative advantage, with each partner
doing what each does best. Machines are facile manipulators of form, and can follow the
rubrics that have been set for them, or, indeed, that they may have learnt for themselves, to
explore the combinatorial possibilities of a given set of rules and constraints.

Humans, in contrast, excel at meaning, and at placing form in its semantic, cultural, and
historical context. Working together, a partnership of human and machine can reflect on
convention to depart from familiar norms, and deviate from familiar forms, to deliver an
unexpected jolt of fresh meaning. For machines to evolve into full partners in the creative act
—to become equal co-creators with humans—they will need to be as facile in the attribution
of meaning and context as they are in the generation of surface content. This is the key
challenge that confronts the algorithmizing of human-level creativity. It is a one that readers
will see played out in each of the collected papers of this special issue.

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CHAPTER 5:
Real-world applications
example 1: the role of computational creativity in music composition

In the domain of music composition, computational creativity endeavors to engender a

harmonious symphony of technology and artistic expression. Through the utilization of
algorithms that analyze existing musical compositions and discern patterns, computational
creativity facilitates the generation of novel musical pieces that resonate with distinct
compositions, thus fostering a new realm of musical innovation.

example 2: leveraging computational creativity in visual art and design

The integration of computational creativity within the sphere of visual art and design heralds
a transformative era marked by the synthesis of technological prowess and artistic finesse.
By leveraging generative algorithms and interactive design tools, computational creativity
empowers artists and designers to craft visually captivating masterpieces, thus expanding the
horizons of artistic expression.

example 3: computational creativity fueling innovation in storytelling and narrative

generation

The fusion of AI and computational creativity burgeons a realm where storytelling and
narrative generation transcend conventional boundaries. Through the utilization of natural
language processing algorithms and interactive storytelling frameworks, computational
creativity spearheads the creation of immersive narratives, thus nurturing a reservoir of
innovative storytelling possibilities and narrative structures.

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CHAPTER 6:

COMPUTATIONAL CREATIVITY IN SCIENCE

BACON (Langley et al., 1987) is a representative example of a program capable of

rediscovering important scientific laws using the “generate and test” mechanism. BACON
takes as inputs non-interpreted numerical data and, when successful, produces scientific laws
that fit the data. Before proceeding with BACON operational details, it is important to notice
that the fact that it “rediscovers” known laws does not preclude its interest as a
computational model of a creative process since, in principle, there is no reason to believe
that the cognitive processes involved in a genuine discovery are different from those
involved in a rediscovery.

The discovery process of BACON is not a random one and it could not be because the space
of possible functions to try is not finite and even if the search were limited to a finite subset,
any useful scientific domain would be too large to allow random search. BACON uses
several heuristics for searching selectively. First, starts with simple functions (as the linear
function), then proceeds with more complex ones that are formed by multiplying or dividing
pairs of functions. Second, BACON uses data to guide the selection of the next function to
try. More precisely, it notices if one variable increases or decreases monotonically with
respect to another. If it increases, it will test whether the ratios of the values of the variables
are constant. If it decreases, it will test whether the products are constant. The main point is
that BACON selects the next function to test depending on how previously tried functions fit
the data. Third, in situations involving more than two variables, BACON follows the well-
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known experimental procedure of changing one independent variable at a time. Having
found conditional dependencies among small sets of variables, it explores the effects of
altering other variables.

With these simple means, and supplied with the actual data used by the original discoverers,
BACON rediscovered Kepler’s Third Law of planetary motion, Ohm’s Law of electric
current and resistance, Black’s Law of temperature equilibrium for mixtures of liquids and
many others.

In validating BACON as a theory of human discovery, Herbert Simon pointed out that
BACON, interestingly enough, initially arrived at the same erroneous square law that Kepler
himself had initially formulated, that is “the period of revolution of the planets varied as the
square of their distance to the Sun”. However, BACON rejected it because it did not fit the
data well enough, and went on to discover the correct law. If BACON had used a larger error
tolerance parameter it would have also made Kepler’s mistake. According to Simon
“BACON shows that theories of inspiration are constructed and tested in exactly the same
manner as other scientific theories”, that is, scientists need not to be “seized by god” to
discover new laws. This is true; Simon proceeds, even in discovering new concepts as
BACON also shows. Indeed, using the heuristic that when it discovers that there is an
invariant relation in the interaction between two or more elements in a situation, it should
assign a new property to the elements, and measure its magnitude by the relative strength of
each element’s action, BACON rediscovered the concept of inertial mass after noticing that
when pairs of bodies collide, the ratio of accelerations of any given pair is always the same.
To do so, according to Simon, BACON defined a new property “P” and assigned a value 1 to
that property for body A and a value inversely proportional to the magnitude of their
accelerations in collisions with A to the other bodies. This procedure turns out to be a quite
general heuristic for discovering new concepts and has been used by BACON in discovering
the concepts of specific heat, refractive index, voltage, molecular weight and atomic weight
among others. Again, inspiration turns out to be a by-product of ordinary heuristic search in
Simon’s saying.

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CHAPTER 7:
Pros & cons
Analyzing the benefits and potential drawbacks of computational creativity in AI
applications unveils a kaleidoscope of transformative potential and ethical conundrums. This
duality encapsulates a spectrum of possibilities, from democratizing creativity to grappling
with the ethical quandaries posed by the emergence of AI-infused creativity, underscoring
the complexity inherent in technological evolution.

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 References

1. Aguilar, W., Pérez y Pérez, R.: Dev E–R: a computational model of early cognitive
development as a creative process. Cognit. Syst. Res. 33, 17–41 (2015)

2. Boden, M.: The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, 2nd edn. Routledge, London
(1990)

3. Boden, M.: Creativity and artificial intelligence. Artif. Intell. 103, 347–356 (1998)

4.Binsted, K., Pain, H., Ritchie, G.: Children’s evaluation of computer-generated punning
riddles. Pragmat. Cognit. 52, 309–358 (1997)

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