Computational Creativity: A Continuing Journey

Excerpt

As the final touches are being put to this very special issue of Minds and Machines, which showcases a selection of the finest contributions to the 2008 International Joint Workshop on Computational Creativity, Tony Blair has just unveiled his memoirs to a sharply divided public. As befitting this controversial figure’s polarizing legacy, reactions to his autobiography—entitled A Journey—have ranged from the painfully predictable to the creatively original. The jeering crowds that awaited Mr. Blair outside book signings and other public events were entirely predictable, as were the cries of “war criminal” and other lazy categorizations that have long since lost their creative bite. Slightly less predictable was the hurling of shoes at Mr. Blair, an analogical echo of another time when footwear was used as a cultural missile against George W. Bush. At a Dublin book signing, this minor act of analogical creativity was both enhanced and undermined by the cost-effective and very ironic choice of shoes—flip-flops!—since Mr. Blair is most often criticized for being unwilling to recant (or “flip-flop”, in political parlance) for his involvement in the Iraq war. However, the most creative protest to greet the publication of A Journey was also the least noisome. Through a campaign launched via Facebook, protesters were encouraged to quietly and mischievously re-categorize Mr. Blair’s book in whatever bookshop they happened to find it. As reported in the British newspaper The Telegraph, employees in bookstores across the country were puzzled to find copies of the book migrating from its “official” home on the Biography shelves to sections such as Fiction and even True Crime. Euan Booth, the student who originated the Facebook campaign, explained himself thus to The Telegraph:

“This is a peaceful and mischievous way of making your point if you feel the same way. It’s a non-violent display of anger using the materials given to me—his book and the crime section—they’re both there, I just put them together”

When it comes to theories of creativity, computational researchers have an embarrassment of riches to choose from, not least because no single theory ever comes close to capturing creativity in all of its glorious guises. The view most favored by computationalists is that which imagines creativity as arising from the exploration (and, occasionally, the transformation) of a conceptual space. This view is especially attractive because it builds on the foundational beliefs in AI that intelligence arises out of the use of effective search techniques. However, it should be clear that in the case of Euan Booth above, such a view is supremely unhelpful. Are we to imagine the young protester exploring a conceptual space of different protest strategies, with an evaluation function that assigns greater value to non-violent solutions? Though undoubtedly useful in some contexts, the exploration view offers little computational insight in others, and is often applied post-hoc as a useful rationalization of what a heuristic-laden program is trying to achieve through other means. In this particular case, the investment theory of Robert J. Sternberg and Todd I. Lubart might seem to offer a slightly better explanation of how Booth’s creative ends are achieved. Sternberg and Lubart argue that creative thinkers “buy low and sell high” in the realm of ideas—that is, they take on simplistic, unpopular and seemingly worthless ideas, adapt them to their current goals, and then derive enhanced value from the adapted ideas before moving on to other unfashionable territory. So rather than loudly and crassly asserting his target to be a “criminal”, Booth recognized the untapped value in playfully implying this categorization instead. His idea is bought cheaply—it does not even necessitate the purchase of the offending book—and its easy execution yields creative dividends that capture more column-inches in the media than a whole barrage of footwear ever could. Ultimately, however, this investment theory is just as lacking in technical details about how its creative investments are to computationally realized. …