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will one day be working alongside creative individuals which happen to be comput-
ers. It is our job as Computational Creativity researchers to investigate the possibil-
ities for creative software, but we do not underestimate the difficulty of engineering
such systems, and we do not underestimate the difficulties we will face in getting
such software accepted on equal terms in society. We have described the overall aim
of The Painting Fool project and some of the components we've completed along
the way in order to climb a meta-mountain. The next stages will involve enabling
the software to learn and develop as a creative painter, and this will raise further
issues. One litmus test for progress, or even completion of the project, will be when
The Painting Fool starts producing meaningful and thought-provoking artworks that
other people like, but we—as authors of the software—do not like. In such circum-
stances, it will be difficult to argue that the software is merely an extension of our-
selves.
The project has always been driven by feedback from people around some of
the issues that we have raised here, and we always welcome collaboration in this
respect. It seems that creativity in software—and perhaps in people—is usually
marked negatively. That is, while there is no sufficient set of behaviours that a com-
puter program must exhibit in order to be deemed creative, there is a necessary set
of behaviours that it must exhibit to avoid the label of being uncreative. By adhering
to the guiding principles described above in undertaking projects with The Painting
Fool, we hope to manage people's perceptions of creativity, most obviously through
(i) the notion of climbing the meta-mountain, whereby we describe the ways in
which the creative responsibilities we have as programmers and users have been be-
stowed upon the software, and (ii) the notion of the creativity tripod, whereby we
describe The Painting Fool's behaviours in terms of the skills it has, the appreciation
that it exhibits and the imagination it exercises. It is our hope that one day people
will have to admit that The Painting Fool is creative because they can no longer
think of a good reason why it is not.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the organisers and participants of the 2009 Dagstuhl
seminar on Computational Creativity for their very interesting discussions, debates and perfor-
mances, and for permission to use their images in the paint dances. We would also like to thank
the Dagstuhl staff for their efforts in making the event very enjoyable. The anonymous reviewers
for this chapter provided some excellent food for thought with relation to the arguments that we
put forward. These comments have greatly enhanced our understanding of the issues, and have
led to a much improved chapter. Many members of the Computational Creativity community have
expressed support and provided much input to The Painting Fool project, for which we are most
grateful. We owe a great deal of gratitude to the many collaborators who have contributed time
and expertise on The Painting Fool and related projects. These include Anna Krzeczkowska, Jenni
Munroe, Charlotte Philippe, Azalea Raad, Maja Pantic, Fai Greeve, Michel Valstar, John Charnley,
Michael Cook, Shafeen Tejani, Pedro Torres, Stephen Clark, and Stefan Rüger.
References
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