<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>As generative AI systems grow in sophistication, so too do our expectations of their outputs. For as automated systems acculturate themselves to ever larger sets of inspiring human examples, the more we expect them to produce human-quality outputs, and the greater our disappointment when they fall short. While our generative systems must embody some sense of what constitutes human creativity if their efforts are to be valued as creative by human judges, computers are not human, and need not go so far as to actively pretend to be human to be seen as creative. As discomfiting objects that reside at the boundary of two seemingly disjoint categories, creative machines arouse our sense of the uncanny, or what Freud memorably called the <italic>Unheimlich</italic>. Like a ventriloquist’s doll that finds its own voice, computers are free to blend the human and the non-human, to surprise us with their knowledge of our world and to discomfit with their detached, other-worldly perspectives on it. Nowhere is our embrace of the unnatural and the uncanny more evident than in the popularity of <italic>Twitterbots</italic>, automatic text generators on Twitter that are followed by humans precisely because they are non-human, and because their outputs so often seem meaningful yet unnatural. This paper evaluates a metaphor generator named <italic>@MetaphorMagnet</italic>, a Twitterbot that tempers the uncanny with aptness to yield results that are provocative but meaningful.</p></abstract>

As generative AI systems grow in sophistication, so too do our expectations of their outputs. For as automated systems acculturate themselves to ever larger sets of inspiring human examples, the more we expect them to produce human-quality outputs, and the greater our disappointment when they fall short. While our generative systems must embody some sense of what constitutes human creativity if their efforts are to be valued as creative by human judges, computers are not human, and need not go so far as to actively pretend to be human to be seen as creative. As discomfiting objects that reside at the boundary of two seemingly disjoint categories, creative machines arouse our sense of the uncanny, or what Freud memorably called the Unheimlich. Like a ventriloquist’s doll that finds its own voice, computers are free to blend the human and the non-human, to surprise us with their knowledge of our world and to discomfit with their detached, other-worldly perspectives on it. Nowhere is our embrace of the unnatural and the uncanny more evident than in the popularity of Twitterbots, automatic text generators on Twitter that are followed by humans precisely because they are non-human, and because their outputs so often seem meaningful yet unnatural. This paper evaluates a metaphor generator named @MetaphorMagnet, a Twitterbot that tempers the uncanny with aptness to yield results that are provocative but meaningful.

Unnatural Selection: Seeing Human Intelligence in Artificial Creations

School of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin D4, Ireland

Journal of Artificial General Intelligence

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

{"article-title":"Unnatural Selection: Seeing Human Intelligence in Artificial Creations"}

As generative AI systems grow in sophistication, so too do our expectations of their outputs. For as automated systems acculturate themselves to ever larger...

Unnatural Selection: Seeing Human Intelligence in Artificial Creations

Published Online: Dec 30, 2015

Page range: 5 - 20

Received: May 17, 2015

Accepted: Nov 19, 2015

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jagi-2015-0002

Keywords
computational creativity, language, art, readymades, modernism, Twitterbots

© 2015 Tony Veale, published by De Gruyter Open

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Unnatural Selection: Seeing Human Intelligence in Artificial Creations

Published Online: Dec 30, 2015

Page range: 5 - 20

Received: May 17, 2015

Accepted: Nov 19, 2015

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jagi-2015-0002

Keywordscomputational creativity, language, art, readymades, modernism, Twitterbots

© 2015 Tony Veale, published by De Gruyter Open

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Keywords
computational creativity, language, art, readymades, modernism, Twitterbots