Can Artificial Intelligence Be Creative?

While it is widely accepted that novelty is a crucial aspect of creativity, philosophers have suggested a more nuanced understanding of the role of novelty in creativity.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio

We recognise that creative ideas are new. In her book Creative Mind, Margaret Boden writes “..but of course, there’s new — and there’s new. Ask a teacher, for instance. Children can come up with ideas that are new to them, even though they may have been in the textbooks for years. Someone who comes up with a bright idea is not necessarily less creative just because someone else had it before them. Indeed, if the person who had it first was Shakespeare, or Euclid, we’d think even more highly of the achievement.”

There are certain instances that challenge the position that novelty is a necessary requirement for creativity. For example, the concept of natural selection, proposed by Charles Darwin, is viewed as a creative breakthrough in the field of biology, despite Alfred Russel Wallace independently arriving at a similar theory. Isaac Newton's discovery of calculus is still considered creative although it was preceded by Leibniz.

Picasso's development of Cubism in the early 20th century was a groundbreaking artistic movement even though artists like Paul Cézanne and Georges Braque had already explored elements of geometric abstraction. Similarly, a first year student's idea that freedom can coexist with causal determinism, despite being a long-standing philosophical theory of compatibilism, can be seen as a creative insight as well.

These examples do not dismiss the need for novelty; they offer a refined perspective on it. The previous examples may not be historically new, but they are new to their respective creators. This individual novelty alone, according to cognitive scientist Margaret Boden, is enough to qualify it as creative. Boden categorises creative ideas as follows:

• “psychologically creative" (P-creative)

• "historically creative" (H-creative)

Anything that is historically new (H-creative) must also be new to its creator (P-creative) whereas psychological novelty does not always involve historical novelty. In other words, creativity always involves psychological novelty in that it has to be new to its respective creators.

This raises the question, if creativity merely needs to be new to their respective creators, can AI-generated ideas or creations be considered creative if they are not historically new but offer novel insights or artistic expressions to the AI system?