Testing Creativity

What is it about?

This paper reconceptualizes everyday creative practices with GenAI by arguing that they are best understood not simply as artistic production but as forms of “testing creativity” embedded within computational environments. Rather than treating GenAI image-making as analogous to traditional visual or artistic practices, we argue that such activities are taking place within “test environments” that both enable and constrain human agency while shaping the epistemic conditions through which creativity itself is recognized and evaluated. To develop this argument, Nicole K. Stewart and I propose a processual framework, based on a mix of science and technology studies, cultural anthropology, and the pragmatic sociology of critique, to treat creativity as simultaneously morphogenetic (emergent, unfolding through practice) and epistemic (structured by historical and institutional norms). This dual perspective highlights how creative acts with GenAI are both open-ended and conditioned by a broader “creativity dispositif” that organizes expectations, values, and evaluative criteria. From an empirical perspective, we apply this framework to a case study of a student using a GenAI platform to modify an anime poster. Drawing on categories adapted from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking—fluency, flexibility, elaboration, and originality—we analyze the student’s interaction with the system as a layered process of testing. This includes testing agency (whether human and machine can effectively co-produce an image), truth (whether the output counts as creative within institutionalized frameworks), and reality (whether the result is judged as a “good” image). Ultimately, we show that framing GenAI image-making as “testing creativity” makes visible the otherwise taken-for-granted conditions under which contemporary digital creativity operates. This reframing opens-up critical space to interrogate how creativity is defined, measured, and governed in increasingly pervasive computational environments.

Featured Image

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

Why is it important?

We need better language to describe how people creatively engage in visual culture with GenAI in a time of ubiquitous testing. Contributes to the growing critical field of testing cultures as well as providing a new perspective on the intersection of visual culture and Artificial Intelligence.

Perspectives