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American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "Every artist was first an
amateur." He likely never thought those words would apply to machines. Yet
artificial intelligence (AI) has demonstrated a growing talent for creativity,
whether writing a heavy-metal rock album or producing an original portrait that
is strikingly similar to a Rembrandt.
Applying AI to the art world might seem unoriginal; there are, of course,
plenty of humans delivering awe-inspiring work. Supporters say, however, the real
beauty of training AI to be creative does not lie in the end product-but rather in
the technology's potential to expand on its own machine-learning education, and to
solve problems by thinking in different ways far faster and better than humans
can. For example, creative problem-solving AI could someday make snap decisions
that save the lives of the passengers in a self-driving car if its sensors fail.
AI with a creative component will be essential in developing highly
automated systems that can respond appropriately to human life, says Mark Riedl,
an associate professor at Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Interactive
Computing. "The fact is, we do lots of little bits of creativity every single day; lots of
problem-solving goes on," Riedl says. "If my son gets a toy stuck under the couch, I
have to devise a tool from a hanger to get it out."
Riedl points out human creativity is also important in human social
interactions, even telling a well-timed joke or recognizing a pun. Computers
struggle with such subtleties. An incomplete understanding of how humans
construct metaphors, for example, was all it took for an experiment in
Al-generated literature to compose a new Harry Potter chapter filled with
nonsensical sentences such as, "The floor of the castle seemed like a large pile
