ICCC'20

What are the existential risks of co-creative systems?

In a paper and workshop presentation, Dr Maria Teresa Llano and Professor Jon McCormack explored what kind of risks advanced co-creative systems will represent to human civilisation over the coming decades and what strategies we may need to deploy to avoid them.

Read the paper.

The video of the workshop is available below.

Explainable Computational Creativity

Maria Teresa Llano, Mark d’Inverno, Matthew Yee-King, Jon McCormack, Alon Ilsar, Alison Pease, Simon Colton

Abstract: Human collaboration with systems within the Computational Creativity (CC) field is often restricted to shallow interactions, where the creative processes, of systems and humans alike, are carried out in isolation, without any (or little) intervention from the user, and without any discussion about how the unfolding decisions are taking place. Fruitful co-creation requires a sustained ongoing interaction that can include discussions of ideas, comparisons to previous/other works, incremental improvements and revisions, etc. For these interactions, communication is an intrinsic factor. This means giving a voice to CC systems and enabling two-way communication channels between them and their users so that they can: explain their processes and decisions, support their ideas so that these are given serious consideration by their creative collaborators, and learn from these discussions to further improve their creative processes. For this, we propose a set of design principles for CC systems that aim at supporting greater cocreation and collaboration with their human collaborators.

Read the paper.

The video presentation is available below.

Creativity Theatre for Demonstrable Computational Creativity

Simon Colton, Jon McCormack, Michael Cook and Sebastian Berns

Abstract: While the quality of computationally generated artefacts continues to improve, some people still find it difficult to accept software as being creative. To help address this issue, we introduce the notion of creativity theatre, whereby computational creativity systems demonstrate their creative behaviours, not only for the purpose of producing valuable artefacts, but also to heighten the sense that observers have of it being creative. We present an approach to this whereby an entirely separate AI system controls a casual creator app, which is normally used as a creativity support tool by people. We describe the ‘Can You See What I Can See?’ installation which performs such creativity theatre, and describe its operation in a recent open house event.

Read the paper.

The video presentation is available below.

Casual Creation, Curation, Captioning, Clustering and Crossover in the Art Done Quick App

In a paper and workshop presentation, Prof Simon Colton reported on the latest developments with the Art Done Quick casual creator app.

Abstract: We report on the latest developments with the Art Done Quick casual creator app, which enables users to rapidly explore a space of generated images, edit, personalise and share particular images, and curate them on a large sheet. This has been developed with a fun-first methodology which has thrown up a number of interesting new research problems, but also led to the solution of a long-standing issue with the crossover of images in Art Done Quick, which at its core is an evolutionary art system. We describe advances in enabling users to create more varied and interesting images, methods to enable them to curate and cluster images, a pseudobullshit caption generator for fun feedback, and how we have changed the genome representation to produce messier images via much more satisfying crossover operations.

Read the paper.

The video of the workshop is available below.