The meaning of creativity through the ages: from inspiration to artificial intelligence
Das, Simon (2022) The meaning of creativity through the ages: from inspiration to artificial intelligence. In: Creative business education: exploring the contours of pedagogical praxis. Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 27-53. ISBN 9783031109287
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Given the relatively new pedagogic contexts of creative business education and creative industry business schools, this chapter aims to examine the complexity tied-up in the word ‘creativity’ through the cultural and historical narratives that have both influenced, and been influenced by, the modern study of creativity—and more recently computational creativity and artificial intelligence (AI). The chapter illustrates that despite creativity appearing in modern dictionaries only after Guilford’s inaugural speech as chair of the APA in 1950, its modern origins belie Western historic myths and cultural assumptions such as genius, intelligence and imagination that have endured into present day ‘confluence theories’ of creativity by social psychologists such as Amabile—models largely about creativity as intrinsic psychology and cognitive abilities. It is argued that along this historical journey towards an ontology of creativity ‘in the mind’, the creativity of the person in social systems (first outlined by Whitehead in the 1920s) has been overlooked, especially in the new field of AI. Rising to a call from Still and D’Inverno’s paper at an International Conference of Computational Creativity (2016), the chapter reviews the facets and features of what they term ‘G creative’ (perhaps God like) and ‘N creative’ (perhaps nature like)—and point to the problem of psychology’s hijacking of the subject of creativity from 1950s onwards with its adopted closed system intelligence in the development of AI programs and ‘thinking’ machines. The case is made for a place in the creative academy, therefore, to help the field of AI move beyond ‘closed system’ creativity AI by pointing to more ‘open system’ approaches, including a recent AI artwork algorithm employing Csikszentmihalyi’s sociocultural creativity model of external ‘rating’.
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