Notes on boden (margaret): creativity and artificial intelligence.

i love this paper. i think it sits at an intersect between: de-duplication (and the pattern) and; puzzle space of the improbable yet elementary case - the gist, and on coherence and constraints. it will be a very useful reference

  • 1, 2, 3, #tbc

boden 1

AI techniques can be used to create new ideas in three ways:

  1. By producing novel combinations of familiar ideas
  2. By exploring the potential of conceptual spaces
  3. And by making transformations that enable the generation of previously impossible ideas

reinterpreted (tentative #tbc ):

  1. structural {heuristic; composition}
  2. for existing domain {map; puzzle space} (kuhn’s normal science)
  3. for new domain {map; puzzle space} (kuhn’s revolutionary science)

boden 2

  • Creativity is a fundamental feature of human intelligence
  • Creativity is not a special “faculty”, nor a psychological property confined to a tiny elite. Rather, it is a feature of human intelligence in general.

i won’t invoke historical ‘human exceptionalism’; rather suggest extending scope to include other species 😉

boden 3

A creative idea is one which is novel, surprising, and valuable (interesting, useful, beautiful. .). But “novel” has two importantly different senses here. The idea may be novel with respect only to the mind of the individual (or AI-system) concerned or, so far as we know, to the whole of previous history. The ability to produce novelties of the former kind may be called P-creativity (P for psychological), the latter H-creativity (H for historical). P-creativity is the more fundamental notion, of which H-creativity is a special case.

to add to this:

  • i wonder if the significance of H creativity is more on the communication and successful application of a novel idea (whereby application includes arbitrarily many intersecting phenomenal domains of concern)
  1. consider person A P’s up novel idea (i), for the first time in history P -> H, but does nothing with it, and dies telling no-one
  2. H seems immaterial here. sadly. historically, this kind of thing is more often a story told by those wealthy enough to P -> H 1
  3. consider person B also independently P’s up novel idea (i), for the second time in history, but has the means to take the time to communicate (i), rendering P-> H; or perhaps even explore application, which might be considered special cases of H
  • i explore this here a little as validation of novel ideas is necessarily circumstantial/ domain specific/ contextual, and really only ‘proven’ by some successful (and reproducible) application

2.

#tbc

boden 4

#tbc

Three types of creativity.

reinterpretation (tentative #tbc ):

  1. structural {heuristic; composition}
  2. for existing domain {map; puzzle space} (kuhn’s normal science)
  3. for new domain {map; puzzle space} (kuhn’s revolutionary science)

boden 5

#tbc

The more fundamental the transformation, and/or the more fundamental the dimension that is transformed, the more different the newly-possible structures will be. The shock of amazement that attends such (previously impossible) ideas is much greater than the surprise occasioned by mere improbabilities, however unexpected they may be. If the transformations are too extreme, the relation between the old and new spaces will not be immediately apparent. In such cases, the new structures will be unintelligible, and very likely rejected. Indeed, it may take some time for the relation between the two spaces to be recognised and generally accepted.

  1. which is such a shame considering “…the creators celebrated in the history books are more often valued for their achievements in respect of the third type of creativity” –boden ↩︎

  2. Aside: I feel like this casual writing style is the result of rote dictation, which I probably ought to try out ↩︎