Artificial creativity: Beyond the human, or beyond definition?

Abstract

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.