Darci is exciting. When we were introduced to the program and the project I had a lot of questions. Why do we want a computer to be creative? What purpose does it serve? Why is it important to understand the functions of creativity? What is creativity? How do you define it?
I was thinking about the questions that Darrel and David were asking us during class as we viewed each slide. "Is this creative? Is this artistic?" The words were so hard for me to define even to myself that I just went with a visceral response. Later in an art criticism class we were looking at Thomas Kinkade and I thought, "This is neither creative nor artistic" and slowly a definition is forming.
But still, what does this have to do with computers? I like that my computer isn't creative, that it reacts to what I tell it to do and that's all. I'm in the driver's seat and I determine the functions. I do think this project is exciting and interesting and worth pursuing, I'm just not exactly sure why yet.
I think that the projects in class have helped us to better understand "creativity." The activity designed by Amy and Melissa helped me to understand that each of us goes through a very real decision making process when we make art, and that that process varies greatly for each person. It made me wonder if Darci's decision making process will ever evolve to be as complex and often spontaneous as the decisions that we make as artists. I found that my approach to the project was very intuitive, I'm didn't consciously say, "I'll draw this and not this." I had the word "lonely" and I associate certain images with that word. In a way I guess it's like what Darci does. She pulls images that she associates with words or feelings.
It will be interesting to see how my understanding of many of these concepts evolve over the course of the semester.
To answer your question, “why have creativity in computers?”, I think it boils down to how creativity fits in with intelligence. We use computers to automate tasks for us. We want the computer to do what we intend for them to do and this isn’t always as trivial as adding some numbers together. For example, when you type a query into Google, you expect results relevant to your intentions. If you think about it, these queries can be pretty ambiguous not to mention may require parsing natural language. If we were to task a human with finding good “hits” for your particular query, we would say that the task required intelligence. The person would need to understand what you meant, be able to evaluate various websites and their relevance to every aspect of your query, and perhaps even take your personal history into account. This is why Google has a substantial machine learning department (just type machine learning into Google and see what the first thing that pops up is).
ReplyDeleteJust like many tasks we want a computer to do require intelligence, some may require creativity (which many would argue is a component of intelligence) as well. For example, we might task a computer with designing a more efficient network configuration, or with finding a mathematical solution to a problem, or with procedurally generating an interesting story line for a computer game. All of these tasks could be said to require creativity if a human were doing them; and it would certainly be valuable if a computer could perform them.