Abstract
In this paper, I discuss the question of whether AI can be creative. I argue that AI-produced artworks can display features of creativity, but that the processes leading to the creative product are not creative. I distinguish between and describe the creative processes of humans and the generation-processes of AI. I identify one property of the former, which enables me to distinguish it from the latter: creative processes are instances of self-expression. An important feature of self-expressiveness, I argue, is that it can be retold in a self-narrative.
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Notes
- 1.
This paper will only look into generative AI, and focus on ChatGPT and Midjourney.
- 2.
This notion of character is anthropocentric: an animal will, for example, not exhibit values or points of views, although it can manifest personal taste—or perhaps, preferences—, interests and abilities. This is not an issue for this paper, because the focus lies on artistic creativity. Being artistically creative implies that one can reflect and represent one’s aim. A dog that generates a painting which appears to be creative by knocking down food from the table is not engaged in an artistically creative process, at least because it did not have the aim to create an artistic painting. Thanks to two reviewers for pointing out that my notion of character is anthropocentric.
- 3.
To speak of ‘choices’ in the case of AI does not mean that the AI made them with any kind of self-awareness. Questions around conscious and non-conscious choices will not be addressed here.
- 4.
Here are the prompts I fed ChatGPT: ‘Could you generate a short text that sounds like a crime novel?’; ‘Could you change the novel in such a way that the killer is not found, the reader wonders who could have done the crimes. In this version, there is no detective.’; ‘Could you modify the location of the murders to a small, isolated village in the UK? Also, could you make the text shorter?’; ‘Could you change the second sentence and make the text shorter? Do not mention the police or the authorities, just the fear of the villagers.’; ‘Could you emphasize the fact that the killer is among them but nobody knows who he is?’; ‘Could you also mention the different crimes that took place?’.
- 5.
Midjourney generates four images corresponding to the prompt, for each of which we can then ask for variations or upscale.
- 6.
Asking ChatGPT whether it “integrate[d] anything personal—some personal worldview maybe—in [its] text”, it answered: “As an AI language model, I don't have personal views or beliefs in the way that humans do. My responses are generated based on patterns and relationships found in the vast amounts of text data that I've been trained on.”.
- 7.
Thanks to the three reviewers of this paper for their excellent and helpful comments. Thanks also to Julia Langkau for all her precious help and discussions around this paper.
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Giannuzzo, A. (2023). Creativity, Intentions, and Self-Narratives: Can AI Really Be Creative?. In: Moniz, N., Vale, Z., Cascalho, J., Silva, C., Sebastião, R. (eds) Progress in Artificial Intelligence. EPIA 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14116. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49011-8_5
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