The Mirror Makers: Sustaining Human Creative Communities With Machines That Mirror Their Makers

This presentation concerns a distinctly human

phenomenon: CREATIVITY.

This is a quality that is widely held to separate

us from most of the animals and every machine.

But I argue here that creative machines – made

in our image but not made to BE us – are the

key to magnifying human creativity and to

sustaining vibrant communities of human &

machine creators.

CREATIVITY is powerful but fragile. It is

lightning that strikes at the whim of a fickle

muse, and may only strike memorably just once

or twice in a person’s career.

So psychologists and creative practitioners have

long sought to bottle creativity, to put it on a

schedule so we may invoke it on demand.

Some approaches are a matter of faith, but may

have as much success at ending a creative dry

spell as rain dances have of bringing the rain!

Brainstorming is perhaps the most well-known

process for coaxing the creative muse into action.

Such processes – and there are many variations

on the brainstorming approach – encourage

people to riff on each other’s ideas while

reserving critical judgment.

But the most productive techniques to foster

creativity are those that drill deeper, into the

structure of ideas themselves.

Most new ideas are built from fragments of older

ideas that have already proven their value.

This is called combinatorial creativity, and it has

been formalized in a number of popular models.

Fritz Zwicky’s “Morphological Analysis” and

Genady Altshuler’s TRIZ each turn creativity

into something one does with the cross-indexed

wisdom of tables and charts.

Big companies embrace these methods whole-

heartedly.

But it is not just big companies or Hollywood

moguls that embrace systematic approaches.

As art became more abstract in the 20th century

it also became less mysterious, as artists from

Duchamp to Burroughs invented mechanical

methods to put their muses on a leash.

Artists turned to simple rules, tricks and random

methods to generate novel forms and ideas.

They wanted to be productive without being

repetitive, or without succumbing to cliché.

The CUT-UP Method of William Burroughs

allowed a writer to randomly chop up an existing

text to re-combine its parts into something new.

David Bowie is perhaps the most famous modern

exponent of Cut-Ups. Bowie uses the technique to

generate interesting juxtapositions for his lyrics.

Bowie even uses a special software tool he calls

The Verbasizer to generate random possibilities.

Of course, this is just a tool – Bowie is still the

master and sole creator of his own lyrics.

Picasso famously said “Computers are useless:

they can only give you answers”.

To go from the Verbasizer to something that is

truly creative in its own right, we need software

that can do more than retrieve existing answers

from its memory stores.

Our software must be able to invent its own

questions and to imagine new answers for them.

Good art is a question, not an answer.

What would I want

a computer for?

I have a typewriter!

The field we call Computational Creativity is

the next evolutionary step in AI and modern art.

Though William Burroughs – like Picasso – did

not recognize the creative potential of machines,

our field aims to pick up where they left off.

Computational Creativity adds intelligent self-

critiquing and filtering to the Cut-Up method

and its ilk, to turn the formal systematization of

creativity into the automation of creativity.

This may seem like hubris to some and horror to

others. Consider the cake on the previous slide.

This is a real cake, produced by a NY bakery that

has embraced the internet. Customers send the

bakery an image and/or text by email, and the

bakery prints them onto the cake with food dyes.

Here the customer used Microsoft Outlook to

mail their commission, but Outlook adds extra

HTML tags for fancy text effects. The bakery does

not use Outlook, so the tags were printed too!

Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, or the Golem of

old Prague, imagine the chaos caused by faulty

software that is allowed to create unchecked.

Except … well, this cake is the result of human

error, not machine error. A human baker cut-

and-pasted the customer’s email into the printer

app, and sent the resulting cake to the customer!

By training our software to recognize convention

and to flag any possible exceptions, a creative

machine can be more engaged in its task than

any bored or over-worked human.

But we do not want to over-train our software. It

must do more than critique. It must originate.

There is an important difference between a

clever and talented forger and an original artist.

So our creative software must do more than

appreciate the surface. It must also embody the

necessary mechanisms and internal processes to

go from an original idea to a final polished form.

If we train our machines to be expert players of

The Imitation Game, we should not be surprised

if all they can produce is imitations and pastiche.

We must understand the mechanisms of human

creativity before we embody them in a machine.

Yet our attempts at mechanical embodiment can

also be seen as experiments in human creativity,

or an engineering approach to psychology that

reveals the algorithmic basis of human ideation.

We want our lawyer, pig!

OK, punks! What’s your

favorite poem and why?

The media’s fixation on The Turing Test is thus

wrong-headed and unhelpful.

We are not in the business of building fake

humans, and creativity is not a test. Computers

can be creative and useful in ways that are

recognizably non-human, but just as useful for it.

The Turing Test is a race to the bottom that does

not advance AI. To make computers creative does

not mean making them pass for human.

How might a computer be usefully creative in a

recognizably non-human fashion?

It might compose a beautiful melody that no ten-

fingered pianist could every hope to play unaided.

Or paint a complex mathematical picture.

Or a creative computer could ask the questions

that most humans are too polite to ask, or consider

possibilities that humans do not put on the table.

Computers may talk about us as if they were

anthropologists from another planet, and open

doors to new ways of thinking about the world.

Computers do not need to mimic us, or try to fool

us, to engage meaningfully with us.

There is a value to being an outsider looking in at

the human experience.

A creative computer may be able to formulate

thought-provoking metaphors or analogies or

report apparent ironies in the way we behave.

As with the words of children, we might be

surprised by what our intellectual children have

to say about us.

I won’t ever

replace you.

Our creative computers are being designed to

complement us, not to mimic us or replace us.

Would The Beatles have been better with two

Lennons, or two McCartneys? The best partner-

ships have a measure of overlap and a measure of

contrast, or even conflict.

Our creative computers will not be mere tools, or

yes-men, or MINI-MEs. Neither will they be

autocrats. They will be co-creators that work

with us but argue for their own points of view.

Well, this

is a job for

So our creative machines will be social machines.

The myth of the lone creator has long impeded

our understanding of human creativity. We must

be careful not to succumb to the same myths

when working toward machine creativity.

We want our creative software to work well in

groups, of other humans and other machines.

Indeed, it is the friction of working together in a

mixed group of individuals that often sparks the

development of creative new ideas.

Pass the

please.

Great idea!

Living side-by-side with other people with their

own goals in the crush of the real world is a rich

source of unexpected friction and inspiration.

This is this friction that Burroughs and his

fellow modernists sought to reproduce with

random stimuli.

So wan we expose our creative machines to this

inspiring friction directly, by moving them from

our desktops into the virtual online world?

Cities have always been vital hubs of human

creativity. We obtain inspiration from each

other’s problems and each other’s solutions.

The Beat poets met in Bohemian cafes and recited

their experimental poems to a willing audience.

So where else would our Bot poets meet but on

Twitter, where a willing listener quickly

becomes an eager follower and an active

promoter.

Social spaces like are the virtual cities for new art

in the 21st century.

A wonderful bot named

@Pentametron uses the Cut-Up Technique to find an

accidental poetry in the most banal of tweets.

Indeed, more and more of the creative impulse on

Twitter is coming from autonomous machines.

This wonderful little bot called @Pentametron is

not very complicated but it achieves good results

with the Cut-Up method.

By splicing together random tweets from random

users on the basis of simple formal constraints,

@Pentametron allows an accidental but vibrant

poetry to emerge out of the digital cross-talk.

Well, I’m

certainly not

favoriting

This has a democratizing effect on all creativity

and artistic experimentation on Twitter.

You do not need to be rich or famous, or be part

of an artistic elite to put your ideas out there and

attract followers. There is a level playing field

for humans and computers.

Anyone can build a Twitterbot and do subversive

experimentation in conceptual art. And anyone

can be an influential patron or critic, by choosing

what to retweet and favorite to others.

@MetaphorMagnet is just one example of a new

breed of creative Twitterbots that combine

knowledge of human behaviour with insights

from psychology about human creativity.

It uses this knowledge to formulate novel

metaphors, analogies and ironic observations

about the human condition.

@MetaphorMagnet is an effective test-bed for

theories about human analogy-making.

@MetaphorMirror is a related Twitterbot that

produces its metaphors and analogies in response

to breaking news stories.

More and more of our news on social media will

be written by computers with direct access to

the necessary financial, sports or seismic data.

@MetaphorMirror is an experiment in shaping

our view of the news via metaphor & analogy,

traditionally the role of a good human analyst.

AI has always raised fears about the unintended

consequences of our powerful new technologies.

Recently some very prominent voices in science

and in industry have joined the chorus of doom-

sayers. Can we put the genie back in the bottle?

While these concerns are worthy of debate, they

significantly over-estimate progress in AI and

significantly under-estimate human ingenuity

and the complexity of the human mind.

Our creative machines will not be the end of us,

but they are very likely to survive us.

Because their algorithmic workings will mirror

us at some important schematic level, they will

sustain the best of us after we humans are gone.