Beyond the Creative Species: Making Machines That Make Art and Music

by Oliver Bown

A multidisciplinary introduction to the field of computational creativity, analyzing the impact of advanced generative technologies on art and music.

As algorithms get smarter, what role will computers play in the creation of music, art, and other cultural artifacts? Will they be able to create such things from the ground up, and will such creations be meaningful? In Beyond the Creative Species, Oliver Bown offers a multidisciplinary examination of computational creativity, analyzing the impact of advanced generative technologies on art and music. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, design, social theory, the psychology of creativity, and creative practice research, Bown argues that to understand computational creativity, we must not only consider what computationally creative algorithms actually do, but also examine creative artistic activity itself.

Genres: Science

416 pages, Hardcover

Published February 23, 2021

Reviews

[Nelson Zagalo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oliver Bown surveys the intersections between creativity and AI over the last 20 years, pointing to multiple projects, books and articles published in computational creativity, namely in the International Conference on Computational Creativity.

It is a work focusing on the developments in the area which have gained enormous recognition with the advances introduced by the large language model GPT-3, making of Generative AI a common term.

However, since it was published at the beginning of 2021, it overlooks what has been achieved in the creative exploration of GPT-3, namely ChatGPT, Dall-E and Midjourney, which emerged in 2022.

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant book that will change your perspective on what creativity is, an what are the implications of AI within it. For me, it represented a Copernican shift for my conception of creativity. Perhaps humans are not at the centre of it, and both machines and other non-human systems can exist within it. While the book may be academic at times, the writing is phenomenal, and Oliver Bown is one of the few authors that does not default to being overly optimistic and naive about AI, but does not default to a harsh, cynical and anthropocentric critical stance. This book feels like a thoughtful, nuanced and extremely well informed conversation with a foremost academic expert and artist about the implications of one of the most important questions of our time: can machines and AI be creative? And, what does that mean for us? Can non-human things be creative? Ollie does not try to convince you of a specific way to answer this question. Instead, he draws from art, psychology, mathematics, computer science, evolution and biology, to propose a richer way to address this question beyond the simplistic "AI will expand creativity!" or "AI will destroy creativity!" binary presented in public discourse.

The central theme of this book is that creativity can be understood as something much broader than what we normally assume. While the book might not cover the most recent developments including ChatGPT and Midjourney, it provides general foundations, and a framing that is independent of the actual model being discussed. It is not so much about what a specific model can do. Instead, this is a framing that would give you the tools to conceptualise any recent and future technology. After all, in a rapidly changing AI landscape, you don't want a book that talks about the newest model. By the time the book is out, the models are obsolete. Instead, you want a book that provides a robust framework and world model to navigate what is one of the most rapid and transformational technological developments in history. The development of potentially intelligent and creative machines.

This is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the intersection between art and technology.