Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1
The Painting Fool: Stories from Building
an Automated Painter
Simon Colton
Abstract
The Painting Fool is software that we hope will one day be taken seri-
ously as a creative artist in its own right. This aim is being pursued as an Artificial
Intelligence (AI) project, with the hope that the technical difficulties overcome along
the way will lead to new and improved generic AI techniques. It is also being pur-
sued as a sociological project, where the effect of software which might be deemed
as creative is tested in the art world and the wider public. In this chapter, we sum-
marise our progress so far in The Painting Fool project. To do this, we first compare
and contrast The Painting Fool with software of a similar nature arising from AI
and graphics projects. We follow this with a discussion of the guiding principles
from Computational Creativity research that we adhere to in building the software.
We then describe five projects with The Painting Fool where our aim has been to
produce increasingly interesting and culturally valuable pieces of art. We end by
discussing the issues raised in building an automated painter, and describe further
work and future prospects for the project. By studying both the technical difficul-
ties and sociological issues involved in engineering software for creative purposes,
we hope to help usher in a new era where computers routinely act as our creative
collaborators, as well as independent and creative artists, musicians, writers, design-
ers, engineers and scientists, and contribute in meaningful and interesting ways to
human culture.
1.1 Introduction
Computational Creativity is the term used to describe the subfield of Artificial In-
telligence research where we study how to build software that exhibits behaviours
deemed creative in people. In more practical terms, we investigate how to engi-
neer software systems which take on some of the creative responsibility in arts and
science projects. This usage of computers in the creative process differs from the
majority of ways in which software is used, where the program is a mere tool to
