Artificial Creativity Augmentation

Abstract

Creativity has been associated with multifarious descriptions whereby one exemplary common definition depicts creativity as the generation of ideas that are perceived as both novel and useful within a certain social context. In the face of adversarial conditions taking the form of global societal challenges from climate change over AI risks to technological unemployment, this paper motivates future research on artificial creativity augmentation (ACA) to indirectly support the generation of requisite defense strategies and solutions. This novel term is of ambiguous nature since it subsumes two research directions: (1) artificially augmenting human creativity, but also (2) augmenting artificial creativity. In this paper, we examine and extend recent creativity research findings from psychology and cognitive neuroscience to identify potential indications on how to work towards (1). Moreover, we briefly analyze how research on (1) could possibly inform progress towards (2). Overall, while human enhancement but also the implementation of powerful AI are often perceived as ethically controversial, future ACA research could even appear socially desirable.

Transdisciplinary AI Observatory—Retrospective Analyses and Future-Oriented Contradistinctions

“…After having introduced a broad variety of near-term guidelines for future AI observatory endeavors based on the exemplified systematic factual and counterfactual retrospective analyses, we provide a differentiated more general outlook on explicitly long-term AI safety directions. For this purpose, we select two recent theoretical AI safety paradigms: on the one hand a direction that has been termed artificial stupidity (AS) (see [196][197][198]) and on the other hand, a direction that we succinctly call eternal creativity (EC) stemming from recent work [13,16,199]. Thereby, note that these two paradigms are by no means postulated to represent the full panoply of nuances and views across the entirety of the young AI safety field.…”

“…Given Type-II-system-defined cognitive-affective goal settings, a systematic function integration can yield complementary synergies. Notably, EC recommends research on substrate-independent functional artificial creativity augmentation [199] (artificially augmenting human creativity and augmenting artificial creativity). For instance, active inference could technically increase Type I AI exploratory abilities [215,216].…”

“…From a psychological and neurocognitive perspective, EC currently views creativity as a tri-partite evolutionary affective construct with varying degrees of sightedness[199] instead of a blind evolutionary process without a goal akin to biological evolution-as mistakenly assumed by Popper[16,211]. This is epistemologically relevant because ideas are not created by blind trial and error (as variation and selection in biological evolution).…”

“…Following Deutsch, it would be "[...] subject only to limitations of speed or memory capacity, both of which can be equalized by technology"[212]. EC views human augmentation as valid transformative defense strategy[199] 17. Importantly, note that Type II AI uncontrollability does by no means imply that a Type II AI is necessarily more dangerous than an arbitrarily designed Type I AI.…”

Hybrid Cognitive-Affective Strategies for AI Safety

“…The neologistic term of artificial creativity augmentation [15] is deliberately ambiguous and refers to two distinct research directions: artificially augmenting anthropic creativity and augmenting artificial creativity. In short, Chapter 11 suggested that scientifically grounded research on augmenting human creativity, augmenting the yet primitive creativity in Type I AI or implementing Type II AI could represent valid strategies to indirectly tackle global challenges and identify requisite variety (also for AI safety).…”