Supercreativity: AI & Creativity

Creativity is a fickle thing. Some people seem to be born with it, while others are able to learn it.

15:50 16 October 2019

And lately, machines are replicating it. “Supercreativity” is a collective term describing the creative abilities that machines can master, exceeding those of humans and producing everything from sonnets to visual masterpieces.

As AI churns out music, art, audio, games, and even literature, many people are wondering, Can technology replicate imagination? There is a strong fear that AI will replace jobs, but it’s safe to say that technology won’t eliminate the need for human creativity — at least not yet. Instead, it can serve to augment the work of creative people by presenting new ideas — from musical genres to different types of hypotheses — humans previously haven’t thought of.

As businesses look for AI solutions, many are engaging IT outsourcing services to help develop ways of streamlining their work and assisting in the creative process.

Of course, supercreativity is an exciting concept, and it’s useful to understand how far technology can push the boundaries of what was once thought to be solely under the purview of humans. Just what can AI do? These are some spheres where supercreativity has begun to make waves.

Music

Mirroring and even creating new music is no longer beyond the scope of what a machine can do. Tech giants like Google are moving into the music space using AI, and smaller businesses and startups are also working with IT outsourcing companies to develop new music platforms.

One example is the jazz Continuator. Designed by François Pachet, the Continuator “hears” the music the musician is playing and recognizes the patterns. Then, it plays back newly-created music in the same style, generating unique melodies and progressions. This can be helpful for musicians to truly understand what they’re own music sounds like and use it to enhance their creativity.

Another instance is Amper, a platform that allows consumers to compose music along with the machine. Humans identify their preferences, such as genre, and Amper builds a track from prerecorded selections. The user can then alter aspects of the recording, such as the key, and even swap out entire sets of instruments.

Games

In 2016, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, the reigning world champion of the strategic, ancient Chinese game Go, which involves claiming an opponent’s stones on a board. Powered by AI, the system outmaneuvered Sedol, using moves no human mind could possibly make.

This case demonstrates the scope of AI’s ability to think creatively — and how IT outsourcing services and in-house software development teams are able to build even the unlikeliest of technologies.

Literature

Could AI possibly write works of literature? Ross Goodwin set off to answer that question and ended up with 1 The Road, touted as the first novel ever written by AI. The novel was written sentence by sentence, fueled by image and location data, as well as dialogue dictated into a computer microphone. The neural network was trained to generate specific lengths of text set by the human author.

Goodwin admits that the book is far from the quality human writers could produce. In the future, perhaps, software developers and IT outsourcing companies will find a way to produce literary supercreativity worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.

There have also been efforts to create poetry with AI through tools like Bot or Not, a game in which players must determine whether the lines have been written by a human or machine.

Visual art

In March of 2019, the HG Contemporary gallery in Chelsea, New York, featured an exhibit deemed a “collaboration between an artificial intelligence named AICAN and its creator, Dr. Ahmed Elgammal.” The AI-generated images were entirely machine-generated, making up the first-ever solo gallery exhibit dedicated to an AI artist. Elgammal runs an art-and-artificial-intelligence lab at Rutgers University, working to develop machine-learning technologies that create new art, rather than simply replicating previous works.

Like many of the other instances of supercreativity fueled by AI, this has generated some controversy, with critics citing the lack of symbolism in machine-created works, among other negative commentaries.

Audio replication

Could AI raise the dead? The Times and Rothco, a creative agency, won the Creative Data Lions Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2018 by exploring that question. They enabled AI software to learn the intonation and delivery of John F. Kennedy’s voice, allowing it put JFK’s “voice” to the Dallas Trade Mart speech he was meant to deliver the day he was killed.

These, of course, are extreme examples of the power and functions of supercreativity. While the days of AI developing a competitor to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony or Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace in probably in the very distant future, the technology is already beginning to show signs of human imagination.

For business purposes, we’ll likely see AI used for smaller-scale cases. For instance, a company might work with IT outsourcing services to help them develop tools to assist with a marketing or advertising campaign. But even these less dramatic scenarios can yield surprising and often enormously beneficial results to people and organizations alike.