A decade ago, the idea of AI performing creative tasks was a relatively niche concept. Today our social media feeds are full of text, music, and especially images generated by artificial intelligence systems. For many, this heralds a dangerous new era that could end human creativity, an era where AI take over all creative roles and human culture is changed forever. For others, it’s little more than a sideshow, no more likely to change our lives than Google’s Deep Dream was years ago. Big technology firms are jostling to create the biggest monolithic AIs they can, in pursuit of a system that can do anything we can imagine, better than any human who ever lived.

But what does it actually mean for an AI to “be creative”? In this talk, I’ll offer an alternative perspective on AI creativity. Instead of trying to build AI that replicate a creative task, like generating an image, will look at how AI can instead aim to mimic the human processes and social relationships that are part of being creative. I’ll show you Puck, my game-designing AI, and talk about how we’re aiming to explore creative AI from a different angle, and how that might hopefully lead to a different vision of the future, where AI bring colour and surprise to our lives, neither replacing us, nor simply being tools.

Bio:

Michael Cook is an AI researcher and game designer, currently working as a Senior Lecturer at King’s College London, where he studies applications of AI to modelling, simulating and understanding the game design process. Mike is best known as the designer of ANGELINA, a game designing AI that has entered jams and competitions, released Android games, and had its work exhibited in galleries. He is currently developing Puck, a successor to ANGELINA and one of the first downloadable automated game designers in the world. He is also the founder of PROCJAM, the procedural generation jam, and a founder of the Knives & Paintbrushes research collective. He swears he once held the Any% Speedrun World Record for A Short Hike, but forgot to record the video.

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