Title: Creativity and AI: A Disjunctive Account
Abstract: In2022, a painting generated by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) called Midjourneywon first place in its category at the Colorado State Fair. While many peopleattending the fair took the painting to be creative, there remains aquestion as to where we might find the locus of creativity. This paperpresents a disjunctive account of creativity capable of explaining the case ofAI. I take as a given that creative artefacts are produced by creativeprocesses. Furthermore, I agree with contemporary scholarship that forsomething to be creative, it must be original. However, originality alonedoes not seem to be enough for creativity to obtain, as we often observe originalnonsense. While other thinkers have stipulated addition criteria forcreativity to obtain, such as agency, spontaneity, surprise,and value, these accounts all posit the existence of a singular creativeprocess differing only by its requisite criteria. I depart from such views andclaim that there are two distinct creative processes. There is Value-BasedCreativity (VBC), that requires originality, spontaneity, and value toobtain. Additionally, there is Agency-Based Creativity (ABC), thatrequires originality, spontaneity, and agency to obtain. While VBC and ABC canon their own occur separately, they often appear together in the sameindividual. I refer to their union as Combined Creativity (CC). While CCmost often occurs in a single individual, VBC and ABC come apart in the case ofAI. In such cases, the AI deploys VBC, and the human prompt giver deploys ABC.Thus, aesthetic artefacts produced with AI can be understood as creativethrough the notion of CC.
About the Speaker: Sofie’s researchis firmly rooted in both feminist philosophy and transgender studies. Thesetwin schools of thought inform her work in ways that are both explicit andimplicit. Her current project brings together philosophy of artificialintelligence, philosophy of creativity, and contemporary poetics to explore therelationship between art—broadly conceived—and Artificial Intelligence. Herresearch questions include: What are the poetics of AI-generated art? IsAI-generated art creative? Who should we consider to be the author ofAI-generated art?
Currently Sofie is working on an article that positstrans poetics as a way of doing trans philosophy, a co-authored piece exploringhow we might epistemically ground diversity projects in AI, and severalcreative works, including a collaborative arts project exploringqueer/mad/trans/femme futures.
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