An Empirical Exploration of a Definition of Creative Novelty for Generative Art

We explore a new definition of creativity — one which emphasizes the statistical capacity of a system to generate previously unseen patterns — and discuss motivations for this perspective in the context of machine learning. We show the definition to be computationally tractable, and apply it to the domain of generative art, utilizing a collection of features drawn from image processing. We next utilize our model of creativity in an interactive evolutionary art task, that of generating biomorphs. An individual biomorph is considered a potentially creative system by considering its capacity to generate novel children. We consider the creativity of biomorphs discovered via interactive evolution, via our creativity measure, and as a control, via totally random generation. It is shown that both the former methods find individuals deemed creative by our measure; Further, we argue that several of the discovered “creative” individuals are novel in a human-understandable way. We conclude that our creativity measure has the capacity to aid in user-guided evolutionary tasks.