The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0368-492X.

htm

The Turing test and artistic creativity

Margaret A. Boden
Cognitive Science, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider the Turing test (TT) in relation to artistic creativity. Design/methodology/approach Considers the TT in the domain of art rather than the usual context. Examines the TT in music and gives examples that involve exploratory creativity. Findings The TT for computer art has been passed behaviourally already occasionally, at a world class level. Where non-interactive examples (such as AARON and Emmy) are concerned, the test has been passed in a relatively strong form. Research limitations/implications Raises the problem concerning the concept of creativity which is closely linked in most peoples minds with the concept of art. There may be no such thing as computer art because there is no such thing as computer creativity. These arguments are examined and questioned. Practical implications This paper produces a discussion, which bears upon the relevance of the TT to artistic creativity and computer artworks and also in relation to musical creativity. Originality/value Provides further discussion about the imitation game in the context of computational creativity. Keywords Cybernetics, Computers, Arts, Music Paper type Research paper

Turing test and artistic creativity

409

What can count as a Turing test (TT) in the domain of computer art is rather different from the usual TT case, however, we choose to dene that Boden (2006). For very few of todays computer artworks carry on a verbal conversation with human beings. Indeed, they may not engage in any dynamic interactions with people. And those which do, may interact in ways (not merely at speeds) that no human other could manage. Moreover, in many non-interactive instances it is obvious that the image or, more rarely, the music under consideration must have been produced by a machine, not by a human being. (Usually, this is due to its evidently high complexity.) So, one cannot always reasonably ask that the work be indistinguishable from a purely human effort. Deception, in other words, is not on the cards. For present purposes, then, I will assume that the human carrying out the TT contemplates (looks at, listens to, and sometimes also interacts with) the result produced by the computer for ve minutes or so, and then gives their opinion on it. And I will take it that for an artistic program to pass the TT would be for it to produce artwork which was: (1) indistinguishable from one produced by a human being; and/or (2) was seen as having as much aesthetic value as one produced by a human being. With regard to criterion (2), the machines performance might be comparable only to relatively mediocre human art, or it might match world-class examples. In the former case, it could count as passing the TT nonetheless. For the original version of the TT
Kybernetes Vol. 39 No. 3, 2010 pp. 409-413 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0368-492X DOI 10.1108/03684921011036132

K 39,3

410

did not require the computer to be mistaken for a highly skilled wordsmith, as opposed to a merely average language-user. Computer artworks relevant to the TT are those generated by computer processes, wholly or largely in independence of direct intervention by a human being (Boden and Edmonds, 2009). So, merely computer-assisted art does not count. Someone who uses the Photoshop software as a tool for assembling collages, or for varying colourcombinations, for example, is doing computer-assisted art rather than enabling computergenerated art. Non-interactive computer art would provide a stronger pass of the TT than interactive computer art, wherein some features are directly provided/inuenced by a human participant (Boden, 2010). The more direct the human inuence, the less persuasive is the pass. For instance, the observers (participants) bodily movements may make the colours of the artwork change unpredictably. The observer may or may not be aware that this is happening. Even if they are, they cannot voluntarily mould the artwork in a particular way, because of the unpredictability. So, their creative responsibility for the result is highly limited. By contrast, the rules of interaction may be more obvious and/or deterministic. The gallery-visitors bodily movements may predictably enable the addition of an oak-tree (or a r, or. . .) at the bottom-right (or top-left. . .) of the developing picture. Many aspects of the aesthetic attraction of the result will then be due to their deliberate choices, not to the computer program as such. The TT has already been passed strongly (that is, via unpredictable interaction, or even non-interactively) by some programs for generating graphic art or music. And some of these produce results that are world-class in quality. For example, consider Richard Browns captivating Starsh, described in The Times as the best thing in the [Millennium] Dome. This was a computer-generated image (projected downwards from the ceiling) that looked like a huge multi-coloured starsh trapped inside a glass table but moving in lifelike ways (in response to the movements and sounds made by the audience). Again, the designs of Cohens (2002) line-drawing AARON have been exhibited and much appreciated at major art-galleries around the world. Indeed, the most recent version of AARON, which colours its own works, is judged by Cohen (2002) to be a world-class colourist, whereas he sees himself as merely a rst-rate colourist. Perhaps, the most telling example, so far, of an art program passing the TT occurred in the summer of 2007, at the city-wide celebration in Washington, District of Columbia, of the 60th anniversary of the Coloreld painters. This group included artists such as Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Kenneth Noland. As part of the huge retrospective exhibition of canvases painted by these men, the organizers traditional gallery curators, not nerds decided to include just two contemporary works which they felt were inspired by aesthetic concerns similar to those of the Coloreld group. One of these was a piece of computer art, designed by Boden and Edmonds (2009). It displayed ever-changing vertical stripes of colour with subtle rules determining just which colour-combinations would be allowed. (Although this piece was in fact interactive, it was not manageable by the audience partly because of the complexity of the interactive rules and partly because there was a signicant built-in delay.) If being exhibited alongside Rothko, in a diamond jubilee celebration of these famous human artists, does not count as passing the TT, then I do not know what would.

Passing from graphic art to music, the composer Cope (2001, 2006) has written a program called Emmy (from Experiments in Musical Intelligence) that generates music in the style of X where X may be one of many well-known composers, from Monteverdi to Scott Joplin. Combinations of different styles are also possible, such as Bach and Jazz, or Thai and Western music. This program relies on a large database of musical snippets chosen (by Cope) as being characteristic of the composers concerned, plus a set of general compositional and musicological rules. Musically literate listeners cannot always distinguish Emmys music from its human-composed equivalents. (That is especially true if they listen to it for only ve minutes, as in the TT as originally described.) To be sure, some highly musical individuals are usually able, for example, to distinguish Emmys Mozartian pieces from those of Mozart himself. However, they cannot distinguish them from Mozartian pieces (pastiches, if you wish) written by human musicians today. So, the TT is passed if not for superhumans like Mozart, then at least for humans more expert in these compositional matters than most of us are. (This is not cheating: despite Turings (1950) cheeky reference to Shall I compare thee to a summers day?, he did not demand that the program undergoing the test be fully comparable to Shakespeare). Perhaps, one should rather say that the TT is sometimes passed by Emmy. For, as Cope is careful to point out, this program sometimes produces scores that differ in more or less signicant respects from the music of the target composer. However, being long past the initial development stage, it rarely (if ever) produces results that no competent composer would have sanctioned. In that sense, one may credit Emmy with passing the TT as a matter of course. The examples I have mentioned so far all involve exploratory creativity, wherein a particular style is adopted and explored: the novel structures all lie within that style (Boden, 2004). Some computer art, arguably, involves transformational creativity, wherein the novel structures may differ radically from those preceding them (Boden, 2004). This involves evolutionary programming, using genetic algorithms (GAs). GAs allow random mutations in the programs own rules for generating coloured images, for instance. Well-known examples include the work of Todd and Latham (1992) and Sims (1991). But such cases, as yet, are heavily interactive: the valuation/selection at each generation is done by a human being. They therefore pass the TT in a sense much weaker than that in which AARON or Emmy does. However, passing the TT does not necessarily bring acceptance. Sometimes, on discovering that the image/music they had previously admired was generated by a computer, people simply withdraw their previous valuation. (I have seen this happen more than once.) Art, they say, necessarily involves the communication of human experience from one person to another: therefore, computer art is not really art. Any beauty it may have seemed to have, they insist, is purely supercial indeed, illusory. (We all make mistakes, someone once said to me.) Occasionally, they even refuse to encounter examples in the rst place. A music critic published a damning review of the rst public concert of music composed by the Emmy program (Cope, 2001) but he did so fully two weeks before the concert took place. On being offered tickets to attend, he refused to do so. His preconceptions about the inadmissibility of computer-composed music and especially of aping specic human composers made any attempt at a TT utterly pointless.

Turing test and artistic creativity

411

K 39,3

412

That reaction, and many similar ones wherein Emmys compositions were considered (if at all) merely as computer output rather than simply as music, eventually so disheartened Cope that he destroyed the Emmy database he had laboriously built up over 25 years. There will be no new Emmy music to be subjected to a TT. (A successor-program, however, will be composing music in Copes (2006) own personal style.) Another disheartening factor, from Copes point of view, was that Emmys music was not regarded as unique. Each individual piece was unique, to be sure. But the listeners knew that innitely many more could be generated by the program. Human artists, by contrast, have limited energy and, even more to the point, a limited time on this Earth. Their mortality guarantees a completed oeuvre at some point. And, whether reasonably or not, people value their surviving efforts all the more in consequence of their rarity. Clearly, the artists mortality is not announced/evident in the work itself, so cannot be either hidden or evidenced in a TT situation. But lack of uniqueness (in this sense), once discovered, is often used as a reason for downgrading, or even denying, the value of a computer-generated artwork. A similar problem concerns the concept of creativity, which is closely linked in most peoples minds with the concept of art. It is commonly said that there can be no such thing as computer art because, in principle, there can be no such thing as computer creativity. The arguments given for this view vary, but typically involve some highly controversial philosophical concept: perhaps meaning (intentionality), or consciousness, or the role of the body and/or neuroprotein, or membership of the human moral community (Boden, 2004). Even life, an equally problematic concept, is sometimes brought into the discussion (Boden, 2006). Clearly, then, there is room for principled disagreement on the possibility of computer creativity. Someone who does deny it on any of these grounds will not be willing to accept the TT as proving the existence of computer art properly so-called. (Analogously, many philosophers argue that passing the original TT would not prove the existence of intelligence in the machine). In sum: the TT for computer art has been passed behaviourally already occasionally, at a world-class level. Where non-interactive examples (such as AARON and Emmy) are concerned, the test has been passed in a relatively strong form. Whether this justies us in speaking of genuine art/creativity with regard to computers depends on highly debatable philosophical arguments. But these have nothing to do with the actual performance of the computer which was the main focus of Turings (1950) paper.
References Boden, M.A. (2004), The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, 2nd ed., Routledge, London. Boden, M.A. (2006), Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Boden, M.A. (2010), The aesthetics of interactive art, Creativity and Art: Three Roads to Surprise, Ch. 11, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Boden, M.A. and Edmonds, E.A. (2009), What is generative art?, Digital Creativity, Vol. 20 Nos 1/2, pp. 21-46. Cohen, H. (2002), A million millennial Medicis, in Candy, L. and Edmonds, E. (Eds), Explorations in Art and Technology, Springer, London, pp. 91-104. Cope, D. (2001), Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical Style, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Cope, D. (2006), Computer Models of Musical Creativity, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Sims, K. (1991), Articial evolution for computer graphics, Computer Graphics, Vol. 25 No. 4, pp. 319-28. Todd, S.C. and Latham, W. (1992), Evolutionary Art and Computers, Academic Press, London. Turing, A.M. (1950), Computing machinery and intelligence, Mind, Vol. 59, pp. 433-60. Corresponding author Margaret A. Boden can be contacted at: maggieb@cogs.susx.ac.uk

Turing test and artistic creativity

413

To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: reprints@emeraldinsight.com Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.