2022 Issue No. 36 – Artificial Creativity

Artificial Creativity

Guest editors:
Bojana Romic (Malmö University, Sweden)
Bo Reimer (Malmö University, Sweden)

This special issue entitled Artificial Creativity aims to foment discussion around the cultural, societal, and ethical aspects of robots or AI engaged in creative production.

The history of nonhumans engaged in creative activities can be traced back to Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s automata The Writer and Musical Lady (1770s), which respectively performed calligraphic writing and music. In the 1950s, Jean Tinguely’s Méta-matics produced generative artworks, in response to long-standing questions about the role of the artist. Most recently, a number of artworks have featured robots that draw (e.g., 6 robots named Paul, Tresset), paint (e.g., The Painting Fool, Colton), or make music (Shimon, Weinberg). The 10^th Bucharest Biennale in 2022 will be curated by Jarvis, an AI system created by Spinnwerks, Vienna (FlashArt).

These tendencies provoke at least two lines of inquiry. On the one hand, one can ask: what are the possibilities and potential pitfalls of AI technologies in the cultural sector? For example, AI makes its recommendations and choices based on its exposure to large databases, and yet Lev Manovich warned about the “increasing automation of the aesthetic realm”, which might, over time, reduce cultural diversity (Manovich 85). Some academics caution against the biases of people who have created a specific AI system and have compiled its learning sample, as these biases might later be replicated by the system itself (Buolamwini).

On the other hand, AI technologies encourage debate about the meaning of creativity. Some authors suggest revisiting the concept of creativity, which can be contemplated as a uniquely human faculty (Gunkel 1). Others conceptualise it as a process in which both humans and nonhumans are involved.

In this issue, we showcase a variety of perspectives around this debate. The aim is not to resolve such a complicated puzzle. Instead, we map a tapestry of approaches that mark the state of the art of a dynamic, emerging research area.

The term Artificial Creativity has been in use for some time (e.g., Elton); it seems to be a rather useful concept for researchers in the field of interaction design and HRI (Human-Robot Interaction). However, our take on this concept is a playful rendering of the term artificial intelligence, which also serves as a reminder that technological innovations are often rife with organismic language (Jones; Boden).

The virtual conference devoted to the same title took place on 19-20 November 2020, and was organised by the editors of this special issue.

References:

Boden, Margaret. The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms. Routledge, 2004.

Buolamwini, Joy. “Artificial Intelligence Has a Problem With Gender and Racial Bias. Here’s How to Solve It.” TIME Magazine, 7 Feb. 2019, https://time.com/5520558/artificial-intelligence-racial-gender-bias/ Accessed: 20 February 2022.

Flash Art Feed. “The 10^th Bucharest Biennale: the first biennial curated by Artificial Intelligence in VR.” May 27^th 2020.

Colton, Simon. “The Painting Fool: Stories from Building an Automated Painter.” Computers and Creativity, edited by Jon McCormack & Mark d’Iverno, Springer, 2012, 3-38.

Elton, Matthew. “Artificial Creativity: Culturing Computers.” Leonardo 28.3(1995): 207-213.

Gunkel, David. “Special Section: Rethinking Art and Aesthetics in the Age of Creative Machines: Editor’s Introduction.” Philosophy and Technology, 30, no. 3, 2017, pp. 263–265.

Jacquet-Droz, Pierre. The Musical Lady. 1770s, Musée d’art et d’histoire de Neuchâtel.

Jacquet-Droz, Pierre. The Writer. 1770s, Musée d’art et d’histoire de Neuchâtel.

Jones, Raya. “What makes a robot ‘social’?” Social Studies of Science 47.4 (2017): 556–579.

Manovich, Lev. “Automating Aesthetics.” Flash Art 50.316 (2017): 85-87

Moura, Leonel. Swarm Painting 08. 2002, Courtesy of Robotarium, Alverca / Sao Pãulo.

Robotlab. The Big Picture. 2014, Courtesy of Robotlab. ZKM, Karlsruhe.

Tresset, Patrick and Frederic Fol Leymarie. “Portrait Drawing by Paul the robot.” Computers & Graphics 37(2013): 348-363.

Weinberg, Gill. “Shimon: Now a Singing, Songwriting Robot: Marimba-Playing Robot Composes Lyrics and Melodies With Human Collaborators.” 25 Feb. 2020, www.news.gatech.edu/2020/02/25/shimon-now-singing-songwriting-robot.

Approaching the problem of artificial creativity through the lens of machine vision, this article examines the impact of computer science’s model of vision on our socio-political values and institutions. It also proposes a creative experiment in “conceptual engineering,” which entails an attempt to build a non-trivial perception machine. This idea references two science papers on the relationship between humans and machines: Heinz von Foerster’s “Perception of the Future and the Future of Perception,” in which the concept of a “non-trivial machine” was first introduced, and Gerald M. Edelman and George N. Reeke Jr.’s “Is It Possible to Construct a Perception Machine?”. Critically engaging with those papers, the author ends by constructing a conceptual scaffolding for the theory and praxis of machine perception, while addressing the wider problem of epistemic and racial (in)justice in the industry focused on getting machines to “see.”

Keywords
machine vision, computer vision, perception, imperialism, bias

Creativity, this seemingly innocent (set of) notion(s) and interrelated practices, is loaded with politics and ideology. With current debates on and experimentation with AI-assisted ”artificial creativity,” this fact becomes increasingly pertinent as these issues easily slip under the radar, especially given the extent to which both notions involved, “AI” and “creativity,” over the last decades have been subject to exultant discourses that sometimes tend to blur the soberness of academic thought. Expanding upon Andreas Reckwitz’s Michel Foucault-inspired account of the historical invention of creativity and the so-called “creativity dispositif” as well as upon Joanna Zylinska’s Vilém Flusser-inspired work on a posthuman conception of AI-generated art, it is argued that without due focus on both the contingency and proliferability of “creativity,” we might end up overlooking the potential ideological and political stakes in contemporary work on artificial creativity.

Keywords
creativity, dispositif, post-anthropocentrism, definitions, ideology

The aim of this conceptual article is to challenge the attribute “creative” when applied to the technical nonhumans (computers, robots or AI). Whilst acknowledging the long history of technical objects involved in a creative production, I suggest that such phrasing carries a surplus of meaning that may lead to ambiguous and possibly deceptive narratives about technical nonhumans amongst non-professional audiences. I shall be using STS theories as a methodological backdrop, and I shall rely on the theoretical paradigms about the myth of technology.

Keywords
computer creativity, AI, drawing robots, technical nonhumans, technological myth, STS

This paper considers how creative agency can be positioned as part of visual art practice that involves humans and machines working together. Examples analysed include projects where complex “intelligent” software systems support text creation, or the combination and transformation of digital images, alongside one where a human artist works with a physically instantiated robotic arm to co-create drawings. The paper’s argument uses ideas from actor-network theory (ANT) and more object-oriented perspectives to theorise agency not only as emerging from the association of humans and machines in networks, but also with the specific humans and machines involved in each creative project.

Keywords
human-machine interaction, actor-network theory, object-oriented ontology, behavioural objects, creative agency

This paper questions how computational art can be interpreted as creative by humans and the theoretical implications this may have. It explores how the affordances of computational art lead to radically new aesthetic experiences. The computational is manifested sensuously but it is nevertheless non-perceptual as although it requires a physical substrate, it is nevertheless not located there. It exists within, between and beyond its material instantiations as tangible objects and the process of that articulation. The computational is deterministic, which may appear to counter any potential for creativity, but it is often also irreducible, and as such its outcomes are impossible to anticipate. This paper undertakes an analysis of computational arts as spectral phenomena, ghostly in the sense that they are non-localisable, irreducible, situated between an algorithmic past and a futural becoming. Through this lens, computational arts offer glimpses into the possibility – and aesthetic potential – of autonomously creative systems.

Keywords
computational art, artificial creativity, computational aesthetics, futurality, black boxes

This paper argues that the ongoing debate on artificial creativity has largely overlooked the passive component of creation. The study questions the discussion of inventiveness merely as an act resulting in multiplication of artefacts, ideas and methods. Alternatively, it suggests expanding the artificial creativity discourse to include concepts of detachment, withdrawal, and renunciation.  The proposed approach implies that an artificial system’s creativity may arise from the withholding of movement or an energy flow reversion.  Renunciation of routine activities and detachment from the external environment resulting from those processes can be accomplished either by a reflexive subject or a machine. To envisage how artificial creativity programmes could profit from exploration of the passive aspects of creativity, the paper reviews manifestos, artistic interventions and blueprints that test the technical domain on its completeness, limitations and self- sufficiency. The discussed examples of artistic interventions into the technical sphere come from artists such as !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Guido Segni, Sam Lavigne and John F Simon, together with the critical essays of Timothy J. Clark,  McKenzie Wark and Silvio Lorusso.  The paper looks at renunciation patterns and artistic interventions as if they were games played either by human or non-human actors. The text reconstructs the roles behind the scripts and the mythologies of technicity in order to infer how non-actual is used in human-machine relation. The study provides a set of arguments for those who discuss alternatives to AI or artificial creativity projects.

Keywords
artificial creativity, AI art, renunciation, withdrawal, interventions, philosophy of technology, machines

This article analyses how the impacts of AI technologies on creative work have been identified and constructed. The concept of imaginaries is used as a methodological and analytical approach to analyse a variety of grey literature sources published in the UK. The analysis highlights three interconnecting risk imaginaries in which creative occupations are differentiated from other occupations – they are safe and/or are being complemented, but are not being replaced by automation. The construction and implications of these imaginaries are questioned in two ways. Firstly, the concept of assemblages highlights the everyday role of AI technologies in creative production. Secondly, analysis of portfolio working and multiple job holding problematises the notion of safe creative occupations. This article argues that the relationship between AI technologies and creative work can be partly understood as enhancing creative production and the opportunities for creative work, and partly understood in terms of uncreative production and non-creative work.

Keywords
artificial intelligence, creative work, imaginaries, assemblages, portfolio working

Artificial creativity is often applied in the production of artefacts and ideas for a human audience. However, as a creative force that is not bound to human experiences, it can act as a way of approaching nonhuman  creative forces from a new perspective. This paper develops a concept of endemic machines to describe a process of engaging the creativity of an ecosystem through a machine that adapts with that ecosystem. A case study detailing the design and testing of an endemic machine called the Rowdy Krause helps to ground the concept of endemic machines in practice.

Keywords
endemic machines, artificial intelligence, soundscape ecology, creativity, eco-technogenesis

The paper reconsiders style transfer with generative adversarial networks (GANs) as a powerful means towards a machinic extraction of perception, one that learns how to imitate how a human might spatially abstract, translate and eventually create designs. The aim is to investigate the potential of deep learning a mapping between two domains, one being the perceived reality of an urban scene, and the other, its representation on a sketch. The creative discipline under consideration in this paper is that of architecture.

Keywords
deep learning, GANs, urban sketching, creativity, Google Street View

The authorship and protection framework of works autonomously generated by artificial intelligence has, for some years now, been one of the hottest topics in copyright law. Seeking solutions, we look at the development and differences of European traditions, focusing on how the concept of the intellectual creator as the author was pivotal from its inception. We then address how this perspective developed implicitly or explicitly to a requirement of human authorship in national, regional, and even international regulations. We note the complex process of balancing the various interests involved in copyright and how the system tries to harmonise them, sometimes unsuccessfully. In conclusion, we point out possible and reasonable alternatives to protect autonomously generated works, highlighting how and why the public domain thesis should be the standard position (although neighbouring rights may still apply), at least in countries that follow the droit d’auteur tradition.

Keywords
artificial intelligence, copyright, public domain, European, Portuguese