What Is Creativity? Can Machines Be Musicians?

April 15th, 2015

We’re fascinated by the question, “What is creativity?” As creativity is considered the defining quality of human intelligence, discussions of the possibility of truly artificial intelligence inevitably deal with the the issue of whether machines can be programmed (predefined) to be creative (undefined).

The 5-minute TED Lesson video, below, neatly covers the issues currently confronting meta design. While machines can be programmed with “evolutionary algorithms” that can source, mutate and compare given musical selections to create entirely new and beautiful compositions, the question remains:

Is it enough to make something original and beautiful, or does creativity require intention and awareness of what is being creative? Perhaps the creativity in this case is coming from the programmers.

What is human creativity anyways? Is it something more than a system of interconnected neurons developed by biological algorithmic process and the random experiences that shape our lives? Order and chaos. Machine and Human. These are the dynamos at the heart of machine creativity initiatives.

 This reasoning about the fundamental origin and composition of the creator connects to another video we recently shared, What is Life?