I’ve always been fascinated by creativity: what it is, how it works, what happens at the moment of inspiration. The many thrilling developments in AI that we are hearing about have cast creativity in an entirely new light. I feel the time has come to put down my thoughts, bringing together creativity and machines, the culmination of much that I’ve been thinking about for many years.
My interest in creativity began a long time ago, when I was a boy growing up in the Bronx. I was one of those students who fell through the net of the New York educational system. Raised in a somewhat dysfunctional household, I did poorly in IQ tests when I was eight or nine and suffered for this throughout my entire public school education, assigned to classes with subpar teachers and uninterested students. The only upside for me was that the classwork was so trivial that I had a lot of time for other pursuits.
I escaped through books. I became a voracious reader and frequented the local public library, which in those days was a magisterial building chock-full of books. It also had an ample supply of records. Always interested in drawing, one day I was struck by an album cover that showed an interesting sketch of a man deep in thought. Although I had never heard of the composer, I borrowed it. It was Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. It blew me away. I had never heard anything like it. I began to work my way back in time, and the further back I went the more amazed I was at what I was hearing. Then I discovered Bach. My first thought was, how did these people dream up music like that? I became hooked on creativity.
But at that time, if you were smart, or thought you were, you studied physics. I did so and enjoyed the intellectual challenges. I studied at CCNY and MIT and then began research. But my heart was never really in it. My passion lay elsewhere—in creativity: what it is, where it comes from. I’ve always refused to believe that it is a mystery.
So I turned my attention to the history and philosophy of science. Reading the original German-language papers on relativity theory and quantum physics, one thing that leapt out was the importance of visual imagery in creativity in science. Along the way it had become clear to me that aesthetics and beauty were also key ingredients in the creative process. These of course are part and parcel of artistic creativity, and this in turn led me to study the relationship between creativity in art and creativity in science. I concluded that at the nascent moment of creativity, the moment of inspiration, boundaries blur between artist and scientist. Both think along the same conceptual lines.
My work on the role visual images play in creative thinking led me to look into cognitive science, to study how images are formed and then stored in the brain. At the time, cognitive scientists were discussing the so-called imagery controversy. The issue was whether images actually affect thought or are merely epiphenomena. I, of course, was and am convinced that images do affect thought. The crucial argument for those of us in the proimagery faction was that if images really do play a role in thinking, then how does the brain store and manipulate them? It helps to compare the brain to a computer, to think of the brain as being akin to an information-processing system. I was fascinated by this idea and thus also by the question of whether computers can help us understand creativity too.
Over the following years, I wrote a great deal on human creativity and also touched on machine creativity. In this book I look at the two creativities together and ask: What is creativity? Can computers be creative? Can computers create art, literature, and music? What will a computer’s creativity be like? And, for that matter, what will a creative computer be like?
One topic I do not intend to discuss in any detail is the many dystopian scenarios that surround AI. Every panel on AI that I’ve sat on or witnessed tends to focus on dystopian scenarios, the downside of AI. It is a theme of many movies and features prominently in newspapers. Shelves in bookstores sag with the weight of doom and gloom tomes. The public loves it.
In this book, I explore the upside of AI: its cultural side, what its creativity holds in store. I hope that this book will show how creativity can amaze, inspire, and open new vistas, as it did for me one day long ago in a New York public library.
Arthur I. Miller
Emeritus Professor
University College London, 2019
http://www.collidingworlds.org
Where to look and listen
If you’d like to see the art and hear the music discussed in these pages, my website www