Paper short abstract:

From human-machine interaction to fully creative machines: What will this mean for the future of ‘humans’?

Paper long abstract:

The boundary between humans and machines – the other - is blurring. Machines have already shown glimmers of creativity, mastering complex games such as Go, producing unpredictable styles of art, generating new forms of music and literature, and engaging in cutting-edge scientific research such as protein folding. GANs enable machines to dream, imagine and begin to build an inner life. They may soon be able to deal with real world situations by inventing their own algorithms. At present humans and machines collaborate, bootstrapping each other’s creativity. The next step will be when machines become end-to-end creative and become artists, musicians and writers in their own right. We need to ask why creativity should be an attribute only of humans and indeed may well need to learn to appreciate art we know has been created by a machine.

In the future this will become moot when we merge with machines which may well be the path to survival for the human race. Unlike humans, machines can look into the future, sense problems and deal with them.

I will discuss these topics and more by presenting an overview of the creative process with my own theory of creativity as it applies to generative systems. This will enable us to discuss how machines can have human characteristics of creativity and be creative like us - and go beyond in the Age of Artificial Superintelligence.

I have begun to explore these topics in The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity (MIT Press, 2019).