Stakeholder Groups in Computational Creativity Research and Practice - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 3

1.1 Introduction
It seems uncontroversial to state that one of the long-term goals of research into
Computational Creativity is to see creative software embedded in society: Apple's
iTunes will one day compose new music for us, rather than just recommending it;
Microsoft's PowerPoint will suggest jokes for a speech we're writing; videogames
will be constructed on the fly to fit our preferences and mood; software will routinely
make scientific discoveries; and household appliances will be endowed with creative
abilities, like a refrigerator able to concoct a recipe to fit its contents. It is also
uncontroversial to point out that another long-term goal of the field is to further
our understanding of human creativity, both individually and in societies, through
computer simulation.
Computational Creativity researchers havemade steady progress towards software
which creates, by employing, advancing and inventing novel Artificial Intelligence,
natural language processing, graphics, audio and other techniques for creative pur-
poses. There is, of course, much progress still to be made technically, so that software
can be creative and be seen to be creative, in order for consumers to be provided with
valuable artefacts and enjoyable creative experiences. In addition to the technological
hurdles faced, it is clear that certain sociological issues stand in the way of progress.
That is, people naturally tend towards thinking that nuts-and-bolts, bits-and-bytes
machines will never have a creative spark, and different sets of people instantiate
this tendency in different ways. Through much engagement and outreach, we have
come to the conclusion that understanding people's conceptions of software being
creative is an important tool to be used towards the long-term goal of understanding
human creativity, and that favourably guiding these conceptions will be essential in
bringing about the long-term goal of embedding creative software in society.
In largely separate tracks of research, we have examined how creative software is
perceived by three different types of creativity stakeholders —people who may have
something to gain or lose from software which is creative—from a practical and a
philosophical perspective. We address the different types of creativity stakeholders
in general in Sect. 1.3 , and concentrate in the rest of the chapter on three particular
types. In particular, in Sect. 1.4 , we address members of the general public exposed
to creative software. Following this, in Sect. 1.5 , we address observer issues within
Computational Creativity research itself. Finally, in Sect. 1.6 we address videogame
designers, as an exemplar of a focused community of creative individuals within
which creative software has begun to make an impact. We posit that, because of the
different issues that each stakeholder community raises with creative software, it
currently helps to study them independently, and suggest approaches to altering the
perception that people have of software in these groups in different ways. However,
by bringing together these strands for the first time here, we can begin to discuss
more unified approaches to the presentation of software written to be autonomously
creative.
Throughout this chapter, we propose hypotheses about how each set of stake-
holders perceive software as being creative or not, based on practical experiences,