Abstract
To some, the topic of AI and Creativity (like the topic of ‘machine thinking’) might sound like a contradiction in terms. For creativity in thinking and other activities, as commonly understood, requires us to withdraw the constraints implicit in rules and rational appraisal. But what could be more rational or rule-bound than the model of the mind and cognition on which AI is founded? The implicit connection here, between creativity and ‘irrationalism’, owes something to Sigmund Freud, who saw creativity as the link between art and play. Both are activities pursued for their own sake, and both involve the suspension of rational principles: “The creative writer does much the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously—that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion—while separating it sharply from reality.”1 There is no reason to suppose that creativity in science is any different. It is identified as that initial phase in scientific inquiry when the principles of rational evaluation and assessment are suspended and a bold conjecture or intuitive guess is made. It is that phase prior to the process of testing by means of the rational principles of deduction and induction.
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Harney, M. (1994). Clues to Creativity. In: Dartnall, T. (eds) Artificial Intelligence and Creativity. Studies in Cognitive Systems, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0793-0_13
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