Abstract
Artificial intelligence has a rich history in literature; fiction has shaped how we view artificial agents and their capacities in the real world. This paper looks at embodied examples of human-machine co-creation from the literature of the Long 18th Century (1,650–1,850), examining how older depictions of creative machines could inform and inspire modern day research. The works are analyzed from the perspective of design fiction with special focus on the embodiment of the systems and the creativity exhibited by them. We find that the chosen examples highlight the importance of recognizing the environment as a major factor in human-machine co-creative processes and that some of the works seem to precede current examples of artificial systems reaching into our everyday lives. The examples present embodied interaction in a positive, creativity-oriented way, but also highlight ethical risks of human-machine co-creativity. Modern day perceptions of artificial systems and creativity can be limited to some extent by the technologies available; fictitious examples from centuries past allow us to examine such limitations using a Design Fiction approach. We conclude by deriving four guidelines for future research from our fictional examples: 1) explore unlikely embodiments; 2) think of situations, not systems; 3) be aware of the disjunction between action and appearance; and 4) consider the system as a situated moral agent.
Highlights
Tools for assisting creativity are becoming more commonplace
This work aims to develop our understanding of embodied creativity, by increasing our knowledge of how humanmachine co-creativity has been understood in the past
The question was whether the relevant fictional agent was capable of the given component of embodiment, or the given component of creativity
Summary
New systems utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) methods to empower the tools themselves to be creative are stepping in different fields, including robots for playing music (Hoffman and Weinberg, 2010; Weinberg et al, 2020) and singing (Miranda, 2008), sketching (Lin et al, 2020) and even fostering creativity in children (Ali et al, 2019). The idea of machines assisting creativity precedes the current practical advancements by hundreds of years Simple tools such as musical dice were invented in the 18th Century to enable musically ignorant persons to take part in writing music and received huge popularity in the contemporary intellectual climate fuelled by rationalism (Hedges, 1978). Provided with a pre-composed set of musical fragments, typically musical phrases that fit certain melodic or harmonic constraints, people could construct coherent musical compositions by using dice
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