Automating Origination: Perspectives from the Humanities

What is it about?

This chapter highlights historic and contemporary efforts to engineer artificial intelligence (AI) capable of producing artifacts previously associated with the creative arts. While creativity and artistic origination have historically been tied to art’s social value, AI art has recently begun to sell for high prices, and the promise of automating artistic production heralds new sectors of economic profit. Yet AI creativity also highlights the changing status of human innovation, origination, and newness in ways that deserve careful thought. The chapter then explores how future research in the field of computational creativity might benefit from a more robust appreciation for the uniquely nonhuman qualities of AI’s creativity, rather than its ability to imitate the human. AI’s exponentially intensifying capabilities raise meaningful and urgent questions of how to relate to a technology that, in many meaningful senses, invents itself. As automation, origination, and creativity cross-pollinate in unknowable ways, an intelligence both truly other and yet still conversant with human categories emerges. Thinking from the perspective of the humanities can help one negotiate this unprecedented challenge.

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Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash