Co-creativity and perceptions of computational agents in co-creativity

How are computers typically perceived in co-creativity scenarios? And how does this affect how we evaluate computational creativity research systems that use cocreativity? Recent research within computational creativity considers how to attribute creativity to computational agents within co-creative scenarios. Human evaluation forms a key part of such attribution or evaluation of creative contribution. The use of human opinion to evaluate computational creativity, however, runs the risk of being distorted by conscious or subconscious bias. The case study in this paper shows people are significantly less confident at evaluating the creativity of a whole co-creative system involving computational and human participants, compared to the (already tricky) task of evaluating individual creative agents in isolation. To progress co-creativity research, we should combine the use of co-creative computational models with the findings of computational creativity evaluation research into what contributes to software creativity

The Beyond the Fence Musical and Computer Says Show Documentary

During 2015 and early 2016, the cultural application of Computational Creativity research and practice took a big leap forward, with a project where multiple computational systems were used to provide advice and material for a new musical theatre production. Billed as the world's first 'computer musical... conceived by computer and substantially crafted by computer', Beyond The Fence was staged in the Arts Theatre in London's West End during February and March of 2016. Various computational approaches to analytical and generative sub-projects were used to bring about the musical, and these efforts were recorded in two 1-hour documentary films made by Wingspan Productions, which were aired on SkyArts under the title Computer Says Show. We provide details here of the project conception and execution, including details of the systems which took on some of the creative responsibility in writing the musical, and the contributions they made. We also provide details of the impact of the project, including a perspective from the two (human) writers with overall control of the creative aspects the musical

The Beyond the Fence Musical and Computer Says Show Documentary

During 2015 and early 2016, the cultural application of Com- putational Creativity research and practice took a big leap for- ward, with a project where multiple computational systems were used to provide advice and material for a new musical theatre production. Billed as the world’s first ‘computer mu- sical ... conceived by computer and substantially crafted by computer’, Beyond The Fence was staged in the Arts Theatre in London’s West End during February and March of 2016. Various computational approaches to analytical and genera- tive sub-projects were used to bring about the musical, and these efforts were recorded in two 1-hour documentary films made by Wingspan Productions, which were aired on Sky Arts under the title Computer Says Show. We provide de- tails here of the project conception and execution, including details of the systems which took on some of the creative re- sponsibility in writing the musical, and the contributions they made. We also provide details of the impact of the project, including a perspective from the two (human) writers with overall control of the creative aspects the musical

Towards Computer Generation Of Text

This project explores the challenges of generating theatrical text in the form of a script using automated and semi-automated techniques. Two different systems, a generative system built on neural language models and an original system called Mosaic, were trained on subsets of a corpus of 127 full-length English-language plays. These systems generate short plays using the outline of a handwritten narrative as a source of structure.The language model was used to generate a large amount of plays that were curated and analyzed qualitatively to demonstrate the play’s cohesiveness and the extent to which the generated text matches the handwritten narrative. The system produced suboptimal results in this task -the language model was unable to generate cohesive plays that matched supplied narrativesPlays generated by Mosaic were analyzed qualitatively and through a large experiment that used numerical survey feedback from 300 human respondents on the crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. Four sets of sixteen-line plays with two characters were compiled using four different protocols. The first set consisted of fifty direct excerpts from the play corpus, while the second set contained fifty plays with lines from the corpus arranged in a random order. These two sets represent the control data. The third set contains fifty plays generated by Mosaic. With the help of ten volunteers, the fourth set contained fifty plays that were written interactively. A volunteer would write a play with Mosaic -Mosaic wrote lines for the first character, and the volunteer wrote lines for the second character.Both experimental sets of plays consistently overperformed the random control to statistically significant degree, with the interactively-writtenplays scoring within five percent of the corpu

TwitSong: A current events computer poet and the thorny problem of assessment.

This thesis is driven by the question of how computers can generate poetry, and how that poetry can be evaluated. We survey existing work on computer-generated poetry and interdisciplinary work on how to evaluate this type of computer-generated creative product. We perform experiments illuminating issues in evaluation which are specific to poetry. Finally, we produce and evaluate three versions of our own generative poetry system, TwitSong, which generates poetry based on the news, evaluates the desired qualities of the lines that it chooses, and, in its final form, can make targeted and goal-directed edits to its own work. While TwitSong does not turn out to produce poetry comparable to that of a human, it represents an advancement on the state of the art in its genre of computer-generated poetry, particularly in its ability to edit for qualities like topicality and emotion

Tipping Points

Die Beiträge dieses Sammelbandes informieren eine interdisziplinär ausgerichtete Urheberrechtsforschung und diskutieren anhand der Denkfigur der „Tipping Points“ neue Fragen, die eine vernetzte Gesellschaft an das Urheberrecht stellt. Die Autorinnen und Autoren untersuchen den Wandel rechtlicher Rahmenbedingungen kreativen Schaffens, auch mit Bezug auf digitale Plattformen, nehmen sich Fragen referentieller Kunstproduktion an, wie sie der Sampling-Streit um „Metall auf Metall“ aufwirft, und fördern die Sichtbarkeit des Kontexts digitaler Archivierung. Die Forschungsgebiete der Autorinnen und Autoren umfassen Rechts-, Musik-, und Literaturwissenschaft, Soziologie sowie Geschichte, wodurch zwischen den Beiträgen ein lebendiger interdisziplinärer Diskurs entsteht. Mit Beiträgen von Miriam Akkermann, Sophie Beaucamp, Franziska Boehm, Christian Czychowski, Niclas Düstersiek, Thomas Ernst, Georg Fischer, Klaus Frieler, Marion Goller, Hans-Christian Gräfe, Dario Henri Haux, Amélie Heldt, Konstantin Hondros, Jonas Kunze, Daniel Müllensiefen, Matthias Pasdzierny, Fabian Rack, Dörte Schmidt, Simon Schrör, Malte Zill. Mit einem Vorwort von Axel Metzge