Summary Task 2 - Creativity

CREATIVE
ENGINEERING CREATIVITY IN AN AGE OF AI (GRUNER)

WHAT IS CREATIVITY?

Creative ideas are original & useful across generations; they are new combinations of old ideas

 Utility criterion – to rule out ideas that are novel but wrong / silly
 Pro-C creativity – to select an appropriate course of action based on given information
 Little-c creativity – everyday creativity, individual capacities for doing things in a new
way
 Requires complex operations of human consciousness (not yet successfully
implemented in AI)
 Big-C creativity – large-scale innovations & innovators that revolutionise entire fields and
transcend time
 Big-C must be a function of groups
 Big-C researchers explore the collective generation & acceptance of new ideas
 Creativity in the professional field
 Making appropriate decisions when info is limited & outcomes are unclear
 When presented with unique problems that come up in unexpected situations
 Deep learning machine (DLM) programs now capable of adapting to unexpected
situations (e.g., autocorrect features on phones)


CREATIVITY RESEARCH

 1st wave (after WW2) – focus on personalities & dispositions of highly creative
individuals
 Individualist approach – concerned with individuals involved in creative processes
 3 main assumptions
1. Creativity must be sth new, unique, original
2. Creativity involves combinations (known concepts are combined in unique
ways)
3. Creativity must be externalised (so that they are visible to others)
 Machine learning programs that paint, write, etc. can be used to measure
creative potential of AIs
nd
 2 wave (during cognitive revolution) – focus on cognitive mechanisms of people
 Individualist approach
rd
 3 wave – included a broader sociocultural perspective
 Sociocultural approach – focused on individuals between domains of knowledge &
fields of experts
 Big-C creativity – exists within a broader sociocultural system BUT does not have
to resolve extremely difficult problems

,  Creativity is the generation of a product that is judged to be novel &
appropriate, useful, valuable by a suitable knowledgeable group
 Creativity depends on individual talent, existing information & judgment by
experts
 4th wave (during 4th industrial revolution) – now appropriately underway
 Application of sociocultural approach to AI
 Humans cannot simply be replaced by AI – AI first needs to be taught what to
do
 We need a new model  creativity 4.0
 Creativity 4.0 – people program AI to perform tasks
& process info in specific ways
 Field influences AI indirectly through the
individual
 With time & training AI may make
combinations independent from original info
provided by human
 Little-c matters most to develop computer-based algorithms that aim to imitate
human thinking patterns

SCHOLARS NEED TO MERGE INDIVIDUALIST & SOCIOCULTURAL APPROACH FOR MORE ROBUST PORTRAIT OF
CREATIVITY


COGNITIVE HEURISTICS & DISPOSITIONAL APPROACHES

 7 distinct heuristics of creativity
1. Problem findings
2. Knowledge acquisition – familiarising yourself with potential solution
3. Information collection
4. Incubation – affords creators time to process collected info
5. Divergent thinking – particularly important for creative output & assessment
6. Combination
7. Convergent thinking – particularly important for creative output & assessment
 Categorising multiple ideas & selecting the most appropriate idea from a long
list
 Dialectical thinking – one of the most central personality characteristics of creativity
 Provides initial support for roles of cognitive flexibility & attention shifting in
creative problem solving
 Highly creative individuals display increased functional connectivity between
spontaneous (divergent) & constructive (convergent) regions of the brain


AI & CREATIVITY

 AI is not a conscious entity & artificial creativity is principally procedural