A General Framework for Describing Creative Agents

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal framework called General Creativity to unambiguously describe and analyze the behavior of creative agents in AI, facilitating understanding of their societal impact.

Contribution

It presents a novel theoretical framework that extends traditional notions of creativity to formally describe any creative agent and their interactions within societies of AI systems.

Findings

Identifies different forms of creativity.

Describes typical behaviors of creative agents.

Analyzes societal dynamics of human and AI creative systems.

Abstract

Computational creativity is a subfield of AI focused on developing and studying creative systems. Few academic studies analysing the behaviour of creative agents from a theoretical viewpoint have been proposed. The proposed frameworks are vague and hard to exploit; moreover, such works are focused on a notion of creativity tailored for humans. In this paper we introduce General Creativity, which extends that traditional notion. General Creativity provides the basis for a formalised theoretical framework, that allows one to univocally describe any creative agent, and their behaviour within societies of creative systems. Given the growing number of AI creative systems developed over recent years, it is of fundamental importance to understand how they could influence each other as well as how to gauge their impact on human society. In particular, in this paper we exploit the proposed framework for (i) identifying different forms of creativity; (ii) describing some typical creative agents behaviour, and (iii) analysing the dynamics of societies in which both human and non-human creative systems coexist.