Creative AI – a reading list

Check out creativeai.org for a curated collection of the best products out there that use Creative AI.

I’m often asked by people new to the field of Creative Artificial Intelligence (Creative AI) whether I can suggest any reading to introduce them to some of the concepts involved. That’s the motivation behind this post: to bring together a number of articles, demos and papers to serve as a primer for anyone looking to get up to speed with Creative AI. I hope you find it useful – and if you think of something you think should be included, drop me a link in the comments!

An introduction to AI

Artificial intelligence is the simulation of intelligence in machines. The AI technique currently proving most successful is machine learning, and there’s an introduction to how machine learning works here:

What is creativity?

Creativity itself is hard to define — but, in the paper below, while the examples of Creative AI are now a bit out of date (it was written in 1998), Margaret Boden, a leading academic in the field of AI and creativity, offers a clear explanation of what creativity is and what it involves.

What is Creative AI?

Where AI is the simulation of intelligence in machines, Creative AI is the simulation of creativity in machines. Here’s a good piece in WIRED that gives an overview of the field:

What is Creative AI capable of today?

Creative AI is working well in a number of different creative fields. Here is an overview of what it’s capable of.

Music

AI systems can compose convincing, impressive, and sometimes emotive music. Below is one of the best examples, from Open AI.

Art

AI can create paintings and other images of a surprisingly high quality. In 2018, an artwork created by AI was sold at Christie’s for the first time:

Meanwhile, there is a growing movement of artists collaborating with AI to produce their work:

Journalism

AI is already being used to write short articles, concerning things like sports events and company updates. Here’s an overview of AI journalism from the New York Times:

As an example, the Guardian article below was written by AI.

Games

Creative AI isn’t confined just to the arts. AI has mastered a number of incredibly complex games, which arguably require creativity in their strategic elements. Google DeepMind, in particular, has made a number of breakthroughs in this area. First, AlphaGo, an AI system that beat the world’s best Go players:

Next, AlphaStar, an AI system that ranks above 99.8% of human players:

And OpenAI have trained AI agents to play hide and seek, finding that they learn complex behaviours that the system’s designers hadn’t conceived of:

Science and technology

AI is being used to make scientific discoveries, which it can do thanks in large part to its ability to learn from huge datasets. Here’s an overview of AI’s applications in science:

What are the implications of Creative AI?

Creative AI has pros and cons. The pros include it helping more people be creative, personalising the output of creativity to the individual, and leading to a wave of new creation and discovery; the cons include putting human creators out of work and increasing cultural homogenisation.

Here’s a good write-up of some of the implications of Creative AI in the world of music:

And, still on music, here’s a good summary of some of the legal questions around Creative AI:

Finally, here is a 2018 report into how Creative AI will affect the labour market:

Want to talk further about Creative AI? Get in touch with me on Twitter or drop me a message in the comments!