Can A Computer Be Creative?

 Artificial Intelligence  

In his new book, The Formula, author Luke Dormehl asks if all of our world, including human creativity, can be defined by computer code, what will it mean?

Algorithms are already playing a big part in fields of work and the trend is increasing. What if everything about creativity could be reduced to a simple formula?

This may sound like the world of science-fiction, but in fact it is just the tip of the iceberg in a world that is increasingly ruled by complex algorithms and artificial intelligence.

In his book The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems—And Create More, author Luke Dormehl says that today we know that they can do so much more with computers and artificial intelligence: from driving cars to diagnosing medical conditions. Why, then, should the creative process be beyond them?

Stephen Ramsay, author of Reading Machines, calls The Formula, "An essential text for understanding the shimmering boundary between human beings and the machines they create."

In The Formula, Dormehl discusses Epagogix, a London-based company which uses artificial intelligence neural networks to screen test films prior to their release.

Epagogix's data-mining and deep learning algorithms have shown that they can accurately forecast how much money a movie is going to make at the box office.

When Epagogix submits its final report to a movie studio it presents a thin dossier that essentially presents just two different numbers. The first of these is the projected box-office forecast for a film as written. The second figure is the predicted gross for the film on the condition that certain recommended tweaks are made to the script. According to Epagogix's system the changes recommended by the AI typically project a 10 percent higher gross with the changes, although it can sometimes be up to twice its value.

The neural network can be used to single out individual elements where the potential yield is not where it should be — or where one part of the film is dragging down others.

This is the point at which an algorithm seems to be making creative decisions.

Fast Company writer Dormehl also points out that in literature, a growing group of scholars have called for an "algorithmic criticism" that would turn literature studies into a branch of computer science. In algorithmic criticism, computer programs are used to determine "vocabulary richness" in text by measuring the number of different words which appear in a 50,000-word block of text.

Algorithms can also be used to determine authorship, as was the case last year when they were used to reveal that The Cuckoo's Calling -- a crime novel written by supposed first-time author Robert Galbraith -- was actually the work of Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling. Rowling later admitted to writing under a pseudonym.

With knowledge of the high-level details that characterize an artist's work (Rowling's recurrent word pairings, for example, or the temp and time signature of a particular musical act) it might even prove possible to generate new works in an existing style.

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The same techniques work for other creative arts, like music.  Lior Shamir has created an algorithm capable of sorting the Beatles' music into chronological order by tracking their musical progression. Soon the software might actually write new music. "Theoretically it's certainly possible," Shamir told Dormehl. "The problem right now is the amount of computing power you would need to let the computer do that kind of composition."

Contemporary Italian architect and designer Celestino Soddu. Soddu uses what are referred to as genetic algorithms to generate endless variations on individual themes. These systems generate evolution digitially. Adopting the idea that living organisms are the consummate problem solvers, and using this to optimize specific solutions, Soddu first inputs what he considers to be the "rules" that define, say, a chair or a Baroque cathedral. His algorithms can then conceptualize what a particular object might look like were it a living entity undergoing thousands of years of natural selection.

Some of Dormehl's examples challenge our notions of what creativity actually is. "It is clear that, just autonomic law enforcement and identity in the age of Google, creativity in the algorithmic era won't look exactly the same as pre-digital creativity. But why should it? Cinema and popular novels reflects the Industrial Age with its focus on standardized products designed to sell to the largest number of people possible," he writes.

By 33rd Square

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