can computers be creative?

Truly creative thinking, of course, will always remain beyond the power of any machine.


Can Computers be Creative?

Aakash N S

Outline

What is Creativity?Creativity : Is it Magic?The Superhuman FallacyTypes of CreativityCombinational CreativityComputer CombinationsCopycatJAPEExploratory CreativityComputer ExplorationsBACONAARONEMITransformational CreativityComputer TransformationsGenetic AlgorithmsGenetic ImagesEvaluation of IdeasSummaryConclusion

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What is Creativity?

The ability to generate novel, and valuable, ideas.

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What is Creativity?

The ability to generate novel, and valuable, ideas.Valuable :

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What is Creativity?

The ability to generate novel, and valuable, ideas.Valuable : Interesting

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What is Creativity?

The ability to generate novel, and valuable, ideas.Valuable : InterestingUseful

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What is Creativity?

The ability to generate novel, and valuable, ideas.Valuable : InterestingUsefulBeautiful

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What is Creativity?

The ability to generate novel, and valuable, ideas.Valuable : InterestingUsefulBeautifulSimple

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What is Creativity?

The ability to generate novel, and valuable, ideas.Valuable : Interesting Useful BeautifulSimpleRichly Complex

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What is Creativity?

The ability to generate novel, and valuable, ideas.Valuable : Interesting Useful BeautifulSimpleRichly ComplexAnd so on

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What is Creativity?

The ability to generate novel, and valuable, ideas.Ideas :

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What is Creativity?

The ability to generate novel, and valuable, ideas.Ideas :Concepts, Theories, Stories

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What is Creativity?

The ability to generate novel, and valuable, ideas.Ideas :Concepts, Theories, StoriesSculptures, Buildings

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What is Creativity?

The ability to generate novel, and valuable, ideas.Ideas :Concepts, Theories, StoriesSculptures, BuildingsPaintings, Music, Movies

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What is Creativity?

The ability to generate novel, and valuable, ideas.Ideas :Concepts, Theories, StoriesSculptures, BuildingsPaintings, Music, MoviesAlmost absolutely anything

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What is Creativity?

The ability to generate novel, and valuable, ideas.Novel :

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What is Creativity?

The ability to generate novel, and valuable, ideas.Novel :P-creative : New to the person who generated itJokes, Puns, Intuition, Insight

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What is Creativity?

The ability to generate novel, and valuable, ideas.Novel :P-creative : New to the person who generated itJokes, Puns, Intuition, Insight H-creative : P-creative and has never occurred before in historyDiscovery, Invention, Theory

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Creativity : Is it Magic?

Creativity produces something out of nothing. How do you explain that?Original creations break the mold, theyre the products of geniuses.Creative Ideas are Flashes of Inspiration. They just happen.It is a special faculty granted to a tiny elite.

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Creativity is not a special faculty, nor a psychological property confined to a tiny elite.It is a feature of human intelligence in general, grounded in everyday capacities.

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Creativity is not a special faculty, nor a psychological property confined to a tiny elite.It is a feature of human intelligence in general, grounded in everyday capacities.Association of ideas

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Creativity is not a special faculty, nor a psychological property confined to a tiny elite.It is a feature of human intelligence in general, grounded in everyday capacities.Association of ideasPerception

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Creativity is not a special faculty, nor a psychological property confined to a tiny elite.It is a feature of human intelligence in general, grounded in everyday capacities.Association of ideasPerceptionAnalogical thinking

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Creativity is not a special faculty, nor a psychological property confined to a tiny elite.It is a feature of human intelligence in general, grounded in everyday capacities.Association of ideasPerceptionAnalogical thinkingExploring a structured problem-space

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Creativity is not a special faculty, nor a psychological property confined to a tiny elite.It is a feature of human intelligence in general, grounded in everyday capacities.Association of ideasPerceptionAnalogical thinkingExploring a structured problem-spaceReflective self-criticism

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The Superhuman Fallacy

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P-creativity in computers need not match all the previous achievements of human beings.We shouldnt say that a computer has failed simply because it cant match the heights of human intelligence. After all, most of us cant do that either.

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Types of Creativity

Combination : Unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas.Exploration : Generation of novel ideas by the exploration of structured conceptual spaces.Transformation : Transformation of one or more dimension of the space, so that new structures can be generated which could not have arisen before.

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Combinational Creativity

By connecting ideas together creative leaps can be made, producing some of historys biggest breakthroughs.

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By connecting ideas together creative leaps can be made, producing some of historys biggest breakthroughs.Poetic Imagery and Figurative Language are examples of Combinational Creativity

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All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players


By connecting ideas together creative leaps can be made, producing some of historys biggest breakthroughs.Cartesian Geometry is the result of the combination of Geometry and Algebra.

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By connecting ideas together creative leaps can be made, producing some of historys biggest breakthroughs.The Ford Motor Company didnt invent the assembly line, interchangeable parts or even the automobile itself. But they combined all these elements in 1908 to produce the first mass market car, the Model T.

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Computer Combinations

Combinational creativity is the easiest for human beings to achieve.A rich store of world knowledge (including cultural knowledge).Making associations doesnt have to be learned: its a natural feature of associative memory.Perspectives and criteria to evaluate ideas and modify them.

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Computer Combinations

The very same factors make it the most difficult to achieve for a Computer.Lack of access to a rich store of knowledgeLack of an associative memory and search process Lack of evaluation criteriaIt is easy to generate random combinations, but not many of them may be valuable.

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Copycat

A nondeterministic analogy-making computer program developed over several years by Melanie Mitchell and Douglas Hofstadter(1993)Uses an associative memory, whose nodes are connected by links that represent conceptual associations like sameness, successor, predecessor, alphabetic-first, alphabetic-last, left, right, direction, leftmost, rightmost, middle, group, sameness-group, successor-group, predecessor-group, group-length, 1, 2, 3, opposite, alphabetic-position, letter-category etc.Rates results i.e. analogies as creative based on several criteria, such as structure, order, degree of randomness.

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Copycat

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Copycat

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JAPE

Joke Analysis and Production EngineDeveloped by Graeme Ritchie and Kim Binsted in 1994.Designed to generate question-answer-type puns.

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Some Punning Riddles by JAPE

Q: What do you call a strange market?A: A bizarre bazaar.

Q: What is the difference between leaves and a car?A: One you brush and rake, the other you rush and brake.

Q : What kind of murderer has fibre? A : A cereal killer.

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How JAPE Works

Confusable texts : if an utterance of a spelling is ambiguous, then it has more than one written forms.serial and cerealspec and spookJuxtaposition : simply placing the confusing segments near each other.bizarre bazaar

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How JAPE Works

Confusable texts : if an utterance of a spelling is ambiguous, then it has more than one written forms.serial and cerealspec and spookSubstitution : substituting one confusable segment for another and using the resulting text.Q : Where do cats go when they die? A : Purrgatory Q : What does a near-sighted ghost wear?A : Spooktacles

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How JAPE Works

Confusable texts : if an utterance of a spelling is ambiguous, then it has more than one written forms.serial and cerealspec and spookComparison : explicitly compares two confusable text, usually by asking for similarities or differences.Q : Whats the difference between a short witch and a deer running from the hunters?A : Ones a stunted hag and the other is hunted stag.!!!!

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Exploratory Creativity

In exploratory creativity, a person moves through a conceptual space, exploring it to find out whats there.

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In exploratory creativity, a person moves through a conceptual space, exploring it to find out whats there. Genres in art, music etc. are examples of conceptual spaces.

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In exploratory creativity, a person moves through a conceptual space, exploring it to find out whats there. Genres in art, music etc. are examples of conceptual spaces.Most artists spend their lifetimes exploring and mastering these conceptual spaces, and produce marvelous results.

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In exploratory creativity, a person moves through a conceptual space, exploring it to find out whats there. In the most interesting cases, we discover both the potential and the limits of the space in question.

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The counter-intuitive results due to Einsteins Theory of Relativity are due to systematic explorations based on two fundamental laws:The Principle of RelativityThe Principle of Invariant Speed of Light

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Computer Explorations

Rules of the relevant thinking style need to be specified clearly enough to be put into a computer program.Modeling exploratory creativity requires not only advanced AI skills but also expertise in, and deep insights into, the domain concerned.

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Computer Explorations

Despite the difficulties, there has been much greater success here than in modeling combinational creativity. In many exploratory models, the computer comes up with results that are comparable to those of highly competent, sometimes even superlative, human professionals.

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BACON

The BACON family of programs are programs meant to discover simple scientific equations given :Experimental dataInformation on experimental apparatusSome inherent feeling about the equation structureIt has rediscovered many famous laws.Keplers Third Law : D3/P2 = cOhms Law : V = IRConservation of Momentum : m1u1 + m2m2 = m1v1 + m2v2Snells Law : n1sin1 = n2sin2Ideal Gas Law : PV = nRTand many more..

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AARON The Colorist

Its creator, Harold Cohen, describes it as an autonomous entity capable of generating original artworks, of exceptional aesthetic value, each one unique.AARON has been taught how to draw basic forms and shapes that form the components of an image, and it makes decisions by considering what it wants to do in relation to what it has done already (self-feedback).Based on a basic notions of color, it develops its own color schemes and colors the images.AARONs work has been showcased at many art-museums and has received positive responses from critics and audiences.

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AARON or Human?

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AARON or Human?

AARON

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AARON or Human?

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AARON or Human?

AARON

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AARON or Human?

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AARON or Human?

Human

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AARON or Human?

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AARON or Human?

AARON

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AARON or Human?

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AARON or Human?

Collaboration

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AARON The Colorist

Each work by AARON is unique and often surprisingin a human we would call that originality.

AARON has learned what Cohen has taught it, but like all good students, AARON surprises its teacher with its own workin a human we would call that creativity.

AARON is a world-class colorist.

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EMI (Emmy)

Developed by David Cope over 2001-2006, Emmy (EMI : Experiments in Musical Intelligence) composes music in the style of composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Mahler.They are remarkably compelling, striking many musically literate listenersthough admittedly not allas far superior to mere pastiche (an imitation).

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EMI (Emmy)

It employs powerful musical grammars expressed as ATNs. In addition, it uses lists of signatures: melodic, harmonic, metric, and ornamental motifs characteristic of individual composersUsing general rules to vary and intertwine these, it often composes a musical phrase near-identical to a signature that has not been provided.

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Transformational Creativity

In transformational creativity, the space or style itself is transformed by altering (or dropping) one or more of its defining dimensions. As a result, ideas can now be generated that simply could not have been generated before the change.The more fundamental the dimension concerned, and the more powerful the transformation, the more surprising the new ideas will be.

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The Three Musicians, Pablo Picasso, 1921 (Cubism)


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Impression, Soleil Levant, by Claude Monet, 1872 (Impressionism)


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The Electric Guitar


Non-Euclidean Geometry : The essential difference between Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry is the nature of parallel lines. It states that, within a two-dimensional plane, for any given line l and a point A, which is not on l, there is exactly one line through A that does not intersect l.In hyperbolic geometry, by contrast, there are infinitely many lines through A not intersecting l, while in elliptic geometry, any line through A intersects l

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Computer Transformations

Given a style, a computer can explore it, but how can it come up with a new style?The rules and instructions specified in the program determine its possible performance (including its responses to input from the outside world), and theres no going beyond them.The program must, therefore, include rules for changing itself.

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Genetic Algorithms

GAs can make random changes in the programs own task-oriented rules.Selection : Parent chromosomes for a new generation are selected from the current generation using a fitness functionCrossover : Selects genes from parent chromosomes, combines them and creates a new offspring.Mutation : Alters one or more chromosomes from their initial states.

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Karl Sims Genetic Images

Genetic Images (1991), produces varied images from which a human being selects one or two for breeding the next generation.Programs from the parents are concatenated, nested and mutations are applied to produce a new generation of images.Often generates images that differ radically from their predecessors, with no visible family resemblance, due to mutations.

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Karl Sims Genetic Images

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Evaluation of Ideas

It is more difficult to express (verbally or computationally) just what it is that we like about a painting, or a song, than it is to recognize something as a valuable idea.And to say what it is that we like (or even dislike) about a new, or previously unfamiliar, form of music or painting is even more challenging.

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Evaluation of Ideas

Identifying the criteria we use in our evaluations is hard enough, but justifying, or even (causally) explaining, our reliance on those criteria is more difficult still.To make matters worse, human values-and therefore the novelties which we are prepared to approve as creative change from culture to culture, and from time to time.

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Evaluation of Ideas

Current models of creativity attempt only exploration, and not transformation and combination, because the resulting structures may not have any interest or value.They lack mechanisms sufficiently powerful to realize the poor quality of the new constructions, and drop (or amend) the transformations and combinations accordingly.Currently, most systems depend either on constant interaction and feedback from the human world, or on culturally accepted notions of value.

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Conclusion

Most people today would not agree that artificial agents can be creative, for numerous reasons.It is not the job of computer scientists to fight philosophical battles over whether computers can be truly creative.As programmers, they can certainly do what they do best, ask for a set of requirements and constraints, and build a system that satisfies them.As is clear from the examples covered here, it would be foolish to completely dismiss the idea of creativity in artificial agents.This is, therefore, probably more a question of societal acceptance, rather than plausibility.As more challenges are met, and better creative agents are built, the current view is bound to change.

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Summary

Creativity is the ability to generate novel and valuable ideas.Creativity can be of three types : Combinational, Exploratory and Transformational.Combinational creativity involves generation of unfamiliar ideas by combining familiar but unrelated ideas.JAPE and Copycat employ combinational creativity.Exploratory creativity involves exploration of a structured conceptual space to discover new ideas .Emmy and AARON employ exploratory creativity.In transformational creativity, one or more dimensions of the conceptual space are altered/dropped to allow for generation of ideas that could not be generated earlier.Transformational creativity is implemented using genetic algorithms, as seen in Karl Simss Genetic Images.

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References

Boden, M. A. 2009. Computer Models of Creativity, Artificial Intelligence Magazine, Fall 2009 Issue.Boden, M. A. 1998. Creativity and Artificial Intelligence, Science Direct, Volume 103, August 1998.Binsted, K., Pain, H., and Ritchie, G. D. 1997. Childrens Evaluation of Computer-Generated Punning Riddles. Pragmatics and Cognition 5(2): 305354.Hofstadter, D. R. 2002. How Could a COPYCAT Ever be Creative? In Creativity, Cognition, and Knowledge: An Interaction, ed. T. Dartnall, 405424. London: Praeger.Cohen, H. 1995. The Further Exploits of AARON Painter. In Constructions of the Mind: Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities, ed. S. Franchi and G. Guzeldere. Special edition of Stanford Humanities Review, 4(2): 141160.

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References

Langley, P. W.; Simon, H. A.; Bradshaw, G. L.; and Zytkow J. M. 1987. Scientific Discovery: Computational Explorations of the Creative Process. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Simon, H. A. 1995. Explaining the Ineffable: AI on the Topics of Intuition, Insight, and Inspiration. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 1, 939948. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.Cope, D. 2006. Computer Models of Musical Creativity. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.Ferguson K. 2011. Everything is a Remix, Part 3 of 4.Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

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Thank You.

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