In my AP Lang class in school, we play a game called "Be Like Socrates" where one person tries to come up with a abstract word like love or happiness, and another person tries to embody Socrates by basically tearing the definition to pieces with a series of questions.
Today, that's what I'm going to try to do with our textbook accepted definition of creativity. When I went on Google, here's what I got: Creativity is "the use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work" or as someone in my class defined it as, "Creativity is the ability to use self-expression in generating abstract or concrete products that are new and effective".
And here's my response:
Is something not considered creative if it is inspired by someone’s work? Or if, like in art, if it's based off of a landmark and is a very realistic interpretation of the image? Does it have to be considered completely new? Does "new" even exist? Take a look at computers and how they are trying to create their own art but using the characteristics of the genre of art or not.
For instance, there is a machine learning algorithm known as Creative Adversarial Networks which try to mimic a human’s ability to think or make artistic connections through neural networks by creating an input from an output, tricking the model into thinking the input is the original correct input, and then creating a piece of work that doesn’t even fit into a specific genre of art that the output was even related to. It is considered to be one of many “concrete products that are new” like the definition said. When looking at which was made by the person and what was made by the computer using this algorithm, it’s almost impossible to tell. To the person looking at the work of art, it looks entirely new, appearing as though it is self-expression (as they don’t know that the computer is the one behind it), so would they be allowed to consider the work creative?
If you wouldn’t consider what the computer is doing as creative, but given that many people can’t tell the difference between computer generated and human made art, does that mean that creativity is limited to only humans? Or would we ever be able to transfer that to automations and programming especially since a majority of algorithms are being developed in order to directly model the way that humans think? Is that enough or not? Is art even outside of our mind considering that we have yet to even determine what is created in our brain versus what is actually part of reality (arguably just vibrating air or reflected light)?
Also, what needs to be effective? Is it effective in bringing up emotions? Effective in helping someone relate to what is happening in the situation? Effective in what regard? Wouldn’t this change depend on the person? Does that mean that there isn’t a way to define creativity as it is relative to each person’s experience?
I personally agree with what the definition is saying as a base-line understanding, but in order to make it more specific, I would argue that when considering creativity, you should also look at the process behind making the piece of work. It is the process of finding the patterns and being able to make connections, not just the actual connections made, it is about the decisions that were made and the motivation behind them, it is that emotional or physically appealing connection while making the work of art that makes what people do creative in comparison to computers.
But ultimately, creativity entirely depends on each viewer's/listener’s experience to the piece or in solving a problem. Objective creativity simply doesn’t exist and it might be futile to try to pinpoint a clear definition because that is part of the beauty, the value of creativity: it varies from person to person.
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