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August 8, 2007 by Cynthia Sifonis.
I have been reading “Creativity, Cognition, and Knowledge.” It is a cognitive science account of the relationship between (of course) creativity, cognition, and knowledge. Edited by Dartnall, the book contains a series of essays exploring the way knowledge and the representation of that knowledge can give rise to creative output.
In Dartnall’s introduction, he made a comment concerning “Emmy,” a program written by David Cope. Emmy takes as input several musical compositions from a single composer and, using a series of simple rules and transformations, creates novel musical pieces in the style of that composer. Reports from those who have heard these novel creations say the pieces created by Emmy are difficult to distinguish from those of the composer on which the pieces were based. In addition, they have been described as “soulful” and “delicately finessed and preternaturally beautiful.”
Dartnall questions whether Emmy, or any other computer program for that matter, can be considered to be “creative”.
When I hear things like this I always wonder why this is an issue.
If a person can not distinguish the creative output of a computer program from the creative output of a person, and if the output would be deemed “creative” if created by a person, then why is the same output created by a computer deemed “not creative”?
Why does the source of the idea matter?
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August 8, 2007 by Cynthia Sifonis.
This Analogy and Creativity Blog has been created as forum for my thoughts about analogy, creativity, and the relationships between them.
Because I find writing to be an excellent tool for clarifying my thinking about a topic, this blog should help me to better understand the topics about which I am writing.
Because the blog is a public forum for a discussion of these topics, I also hope to gain greater understanding of the topics through the input and feedback of others.
So join me in my exploration. Let us see what we can discover together.
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