A Personal Perspective into the Future for Computational Creativity - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 393

The general public is worried about the possibilities of machines taking away
the jobs of many humans now involved in the creative industries. Funding agencies
have over the past few years been trying to project the criteria traditionally applied to
research in technology toComputational Creativity. In doing so, they are handicapped
by the fact that research investment in technology has in the past been focused on
industrial processes and/or endeavors known to be profitable. This would correspond
to computational systems that instantiate processes 5 and 6 as described above. A
significant portion of the innovative aspect of CC lies in the fact that technology
is being shifted from a tool for simplifying (even undertaking) repetitive tasks that
machines can perform better than humans, to a tool for suggesting new procedures
or even new types of artefacts that humans might not have considered before. To
achieve this, more systems should be developed that address the design processes.
This constitutes a significant conceptual leap along different axes. First, because
while a technology for undertaking a repetitive task may replace a human worker,
any new procedures or new types of artefact produced by CC technologies are very
likely to need human validation before being deemed acceptable. Whereas industrial
technology replaces humans (thereby including a potential for generating significant
increases in financial profit), CC technologies are more likely to serve as tools for
extending the creative range of human operators. It is unlikely that CC technologies
lead to increased productivity to the extent that they result in layoffs. By definition,
CC techniques should focus on decisions to produce artefacts of type A rather than
artefacts of type B, rather than on producing artefacts of any given type faster or in
a larger scale.
Some members of the general public are also uncomfortable at the possibility
of certain artefacts that they associate with creativity (such as paintings, music, or
poems) being generated by machines without a soul. This particular argument says
more about how people justify the impact of these artefacts on themselves than about
the properties of the artefacts. This brings up again the already mentioned challenged
of modelling a mind's reaction to given artefacts. As more becomes known about
how these processes operate, such fears should progressively fade away.
19.3.3 Open Avenues for Computational Creativity
Over the years researchers in the field of Computational Creativity have expressed
their thoughts about what might be important directions for the future. In this section
I consider some of these statements and analyse them with respect to the arguments
presented in the rest of this chapter.
Wiggins [ 21 ] presented a framework for description, analysis and comparison of
creative systems which described the operation of such systems as a search over a
conceptual space, defined in terms of a number of functions for traversal of such a
space and evaluation of candidate points. This was intended as a conceptualization
of the system rather than a description of their operative procedures. Wiggins men-
tioned that transformational creativity, as described by Boden [ 1 ], could be achieved