Al-Amn Magazine

CREATIVITY W hat makes people think an AI system is creative? New research shows that it depends on how much they see of the creative act. The findings have implications for how we research and design creative AI systems, and they also raise fundamental questions about how we perceive creativity in other people. “AI is playing an increasingly large role in creative practice. Whether that means we should call it creative or not is a different question,” says Niki Pennanen, the study’s lead author. Pennanen is researching AI systems at Aalto University and has a background in psychology. Together with other researchers at Aalto and the University of Helsinki, he did experiments to find out whether people think a robot is more creative if they see more of the creative act. In the study, participants were initially asked to evaluate the creativity of robots based only on still life drawings they had made. They were told the robots were driven by AI, but in fact it had been programmed to reproduce drawings that the researchers had commissioned from an artist. This deception made it possible to measure people’s perception of creativity without requiring the robot to be creative, which would have introduced too much variability between the drawings. Next, the study participants evaluated how creative the drawings were when they saw not only the final product but also a video of the drawing process - the lines appearing on the page, but not the robot creating them. In the final stage, participants scored the drawings when they could see all three elements: the final product, the process, and the robot making the drawing. I n t he eye of t he beho l der I s AI t ru l y creat i ve?