Study: Seeing AI at work increases how we perceive its creativity

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more involved in our everyday lives, including creative processes, a question arises as to whether AI is capable of being creative to begin with, and how we perceive this creativity.

Notably, it seems that AI’s perceived creativity depends largely on how much of this creative work we witness ourselves, according to the study carried out by researchers at Aalto University and the University of Helsinki, and published in the journal ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction on April 7.

Per the study’s lead author, Niki Pennanen:

“AI is playing an increasingly large role in creative practice. Whether that means we should call it creative or not is a different question.”

Specifically, the study called ‘From Product to Producer: The Impact of Perceptual Evidence and Robot Embodiment on the Human Assessment of AI Creativity,’ aimed to find out whether people think a robot is more creative if they see more of the creative act themselves.

Perceived AI creativity testing

To this end, the researchers first asked participants to evaluate the creativity of robots based only on still-life drawings they had made, which were reproductions of drawings commissioned from an artist.

Then, they asked the participants to evaluate how creative the drawings were when they witnessed both the final product but also a video of the drawing process, including the lines appearing on the page, but not the robot making them.

Finally, participants scored the drawings when they could see all three elements – the final product, the process, and the robot making the drawing – and the results were fascinating.

People saw the drawings as more creative the more elements of the creative act they witnessed, with Christian Guckelsberger, the study’s senior author, commenting that “The more people saw, the more creative they judged it to be.” As he further explained:

“The study suggests that revealing more about the process and producer can be conducive to people’s perception of the systems’ creativity. (…) But if we added elements to make AI systems seem more creative even though the system is in fact performing the same way, we could question whether that’s actually a good thing.”

In his view, this could be beneficial in cases where it would help people stay engaged with a co-creative system. On the other hand, it could provide a deceptive impression of how creative an AI system truly is. Either way, the study helps address this conflict by pointing to our own human biases.

Meanwhile, robots may not take over our creative domain just yet, but they may be exceptionally useful around the house, with Figure’s proprietary humanoid robot Helix AI seamlessly interacting and responding to its environment, taking care of mundane tasks like putting away groceries.