Is AI truly creative? Study shows how visibility of process shapes perception

What makes individuals assume an AI system is inventive? New analysis exhibits that it relies on how a lot they see of the inventive act. The findings have implications for the way we analysis and design inventive AI techniques, they usually additionally elevate basic questions on how we understand creativity in different individuals.

The work is published within the journal ACM Transactions on Human-Robotic Interplay.

“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 examine’s lead writer. Pennanen is researching AI techniques at Aalto University and has a background in psychology. Along with different researchers at Aalto and the University of Helsinki, he did experiments to seek out out whether or not individuals assume a robotic is extra inventive in the event that they see extra of the inventive act.

Within the examine, members had been initially requested to judge the creativity of robots based mostly solely on nonetheless life drawings that they had made. They had been instructed the robots had been pushed by AI, however actually it had been programmed to breed drawings that the researchers had commissioned from an artist. This deception made it potential to measure individuals’s perception of creativity with out requiring the robotic to be inventive, which might have launched an excessive amount of variability between the drawings.

Subsequent, the examine members evaluated how inventive the drawings had been after they noticed not solely the ultimate product but additionally a video of the drawing course of––the strains showing on the web page, however not the robotic creating them. Within the closing stage, members scored the drawings after they may see all three parts: the ultimate product, the method, and the robotic making the drawing.

The findings confirmed that the drawings had been seen as extra inventive as extra parts of the inventive act had been revealed.

“The more people saw, the more creative they judged it to be,” says Christian Guckelsberger, assistant professor of inventive applied sciences at Aalto and the examine’s senior writer. “As far as I’m aware, we’re the first to study the effects of perceiving product, process and producer in a separate and controlled manner, not only in the context of AI but also more generally.”

The facility of notion

Understanding how individuals assess the creativity of robots or different synthetic techniques is vital in serious about find out how to design them––but it surely’s not completely clear what the suitable design selections can be.

“The study suggests that revealing more about the process and producer can be conducive to people’s perception of the systems’ creativity,” says Guckelsberger. “But if we added elements to make AI systems seem more creative even though the system is in fact performing the same way, we could question whether that’s actually a good thing.”

In some instances, that might be useful––for instance, it may be a approach to assist individuals keep engaged with a co-creative system. However in different contexts, it may give individuals a misleading impression of how inventive a synthetic system actually is.

“Our findings help address this conflict by giving us a better idea of our own human biases. This research makes them a bit more transparent, which is also important from the user’s perspective, for us to understand how a system’s design affects our perception of it,” says Guckelsberger.

Along with these social and design implications, the findings even have significance for analysis on inventive AI techniques. If our judgment of creativity relies on how a system is offered, then future research ought to management for that issue. Likewise, current analysis must be reevaluated in mild of those findings––evaluating the creativity of various techniques with out accounting for variations of their presentation may have led to false conclusions.

One other intriguing query posed by this analysis is what it tells us about ourselves.

“Now that we’ve found this about people’s perception of AI creativity, does it also apply to people’s perception of other people?” asks Guckelsberger.

Does form matter?

The researchers additionally carried out the experiments with two totally different robotic designs. Their objective was to check whether or not individuals scored the creativity in another way relying on the robotic’s form, as a result of earlier work had advised a hyperlink between form and perceived creativity.

The workforce examined whether or not individuals noticed totally different ranges of creativity when a nonetheless life was drawn by a modern arm-like robotic or a extra mechanistic plotter robot. Conserving the drawings constant between the robots and from one participant to a different was fairly difficult.

“I think our biggest difficulty was the physical robots themselves. We did a lot of work with the robots and the drawing process to try to keep everything identical so we could do a scientifically rigorous comparison,” says Pennanen.

The researchers had been stunned to seek out no important distinction in how individuals scored the 2 robots. They’re planning future work to look additional into this counterintuitive outcome, in addition to what different parts affect our notion of creativity.

“We’re interested in doing more research about what kinds of biases affect our evaluation of creative and embodied AI systems and how those effects happen,” says Pennanen.

The findings must also be confirmed for various creative genres, in addition to different types of artwork and inventive expression. To make it simpler for others to copy their work and construct on it, the researchers adopted strict open science practices. As synthetic techniques turn into commonplace, understanding the components shaping our notion of their creativity is significant for efficient design––and it could additionally shed some mild on how we acknowledge creativity in people.