This paper examines whether artificial intelligence (AI) systems can creatively pose questions, approached from the dual perspective of a researcher trained in electrical engineering, pattern recognition, machine learning, and neural networks, who also has extensive experience in the arts as an actor, director, writer, composer, and visual artist, alongside philosophical insights.
The paper draws on Margaret Boden's foundational framework, analyzing her three properties of creativity (novelty, surprise, and value) and her three types of creative processes (combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational).
It argues that AI systems are structurally incapable of creativity in its strongest sense. While they demonstrate genuine capability in combinatorial creativity, they are significantly limited in exploratory creativity and fundamentally incapable of transformational creativity.
The paper emphasizes that the most critical limitation of current AI systems is not the lack of novelty per se, but the absence of mechanisms for serendipity, accident, or the unexpected, all of which play a central role in the phenomenology of creativity. Furthermore, AI lacks any subject position from which to recognize and welcome such chance events.
The conclusion proposes a model for human-AI creative collaboration that is both realistic and generative, illustrated by several concrete experiments. Notably, the paper itself serves as a demonstration of its thesis: it was composed through a deliberate human-AI collaborative process, as described in the methodological note.
Blogger's Review: This paper clearly articulates the limitations of AI in terms of creativity, particularly the lack of exploratory and transformational capabilities. While AI shows potential in combinatorial creativity, its shortcoming in the absence of serendipity is thought-provoking. Future research should focus on how to leverage human-AI collaboration for more creative outputs.