Creativity with a Collaborator

Teaching and understanding creativity.   And thinking about the nature of people-machine collaboration.

Want to Understand Creativity?  Enlist an AI Collaborator.  by Nick Stockton

Scientists think artificial intelligence (AI) can be a tool for understanding creativity and its theoretical limits. Lav Varshney at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign says he is developing a mathematical creativity theory defined as "things that are both novel, and of high quality in their domain." Varshney says in one example he trains his AI to quantify the "goodness" of new kinds of food based on molecular characteristics of human flavor perception, while in terms of fashion the algorithm is fed data on properties such as color matching. Varshney notes increasing the value of both quality and novelty makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish a thing's newness and goodness. Another project of Varshney's involves teaching algorithms musical composition by having them learn from other algorithms that introduce constraints progressively. Although this is not pure creativity, the project's success makes Varshney believe algorithms would work well as creative collaborators with human artists.  .... "