Creative Outcome as Implausible Utility

Abstract

Two perspectives are used to reframe Simonton’s recent three-factor definition of creative outcome. The first perspective is functional: that creative ideas are those that add significantly to knowledge by providing both utility and learning. The second perspective is calculational: that learning can be estimated by the change in probabilistic beliefs about an idea’s utility before and after it has played out in its environment. The results of the reframing are proposed conceptual and mathematical definitions of (a) creative outcome as the product of two overarching factors (utility and learning) and (b) learning as a function of two subsidiary factors (blindness reduction and surprise). Learning will be shown to depend much more strongly on surprise than on blindness reduction, so creative outcome may then also be defined as “implausible utility.”

Hybrid Cognitive-Affective Strategies for AI Safety

“…Creativity research has been described as a relatively understudied and underfunded field in psychology and neuroscience [142]. The term refers mostly either to research on creativity outcome being the contextualized evaluation of creative ideas (or artifacts) after their generation or to research on the creativity process itself related to the forerunning idea generation [410]. In this section, we examine both complex concepts and establish a possible scientific grounding for strategies on artificial creativity augmentation (ACA) to be addressed in Section 11.2.…”

“…not being surprising and the latter not original. However, a refinement of this subjective three-factor definition of creativity has been recently provided by Tsao et al [410] who associate creative outcome with perceived utility and learning whereby learning subsumes a blindness factor and importantly surprise. In order to unfold this definition, the next paragraph briefly expounds the contextual methodology the authors presuppose to assess a given idea in context.…”

“…In the pre-test phase, a prior assessment in line with the best current knowledge is performed in which a probability distribution over the assumed utility of that idea is provided. (A reference is the routine expertise exhibited by "persons having ordinary skill in the art" [410].) In the test phase, the idea is deployed in the environment and observations of its consequences become available.…”

“…a subjective high certainty causing a reshaping of prior knowledge, a useful learning. In short, creative ideas exhibit implausible utility [410]. This underlying decomposition of creativity perception into a utility and a learning part, suggests the consideration of a motivational and an epistemic 3 component respectively.…”

“…(Certain researchers prefer to label this continuum as a blindness continuum [391], while some argue that a process can be either blind or sighted to a certain degree [271]. To put it very briefly, the blindness degree b is defined as b = (1 − s) with s representing the sightedness degree [391,410] reducing the issue to a linguistic debate. 4 ) Along this sightedness continuum, Dietrich distinguishes between the deliberate mode, the spontaneous mode and the flow mode [142].…”