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Creativity isn't magical. It's an aspect of normal human intelligence, not a special faculty granted to a tiny elite. There are three forms: combinational, exploratory, and transformational. All three can be modeled by AI-in some cases, with impressive results. AI techniques underlie various types of computer art. Whether computers could "really" be creative isn't a scientific question but a philosophical one, to which there's no clear answer. But we do have the beginnings of a scientific understanding of creativity.
Creativity is a marvel of the human mind, and an obvious goal for AI workers. Indeed, the proposal that led to the famous 1956 Dartmouth Summer School often remembered as the time of AI's birth mentioned "creativity," "invention," and "discovery" as key aims for the newly named discipline (McCarthy et al. 1955, 45, 49ff.). And, 50 years later, Herb Simon-in an email discussion between AAAI Fellows (quoted in Boden 2006, 1101)-cited a paper on creativity (Simon 1995) in answer to the challenge of whether AI is a science, as opposed to "mere" engineering.
But if its status as an AI goal is obvious, its credibility as a potential AI achievement is not. Many people, including many otherwise hard-headed scientists, doubt-or even deny outright- the possibility of a computer's ever being creative.
Sometimes, such people are saying that, irrespective of its performance (which might even match superlative human examples), no computer could "really" be creative: the creativity lies entirely in the programmer. That's a philosophical question that needn't detain us here (but see the final section, below).
More to the point, these people typically claim that a computer simply could not generate apparently creative performance. That's a factual claim-which, in effect, dismisses AI research on creativity as a waste of time.
However, it is mistaken: AI scientists working in this area aren't doomed to disappointment. It doesn't follow that they will ever, in practice, be able to engineer a new Shakespeare or a neo-Mozart (although the latter goal has been approached more nearly than most people imagine). But lesser examples of AI creativity already abound. And, crucially, they help us to understand how human creativity is possible.
What Is Creativity?
Creativity can be defined as the ability to generate novel, and valuable, ideas. Valuable, here, has...