Towards a Formal Creativity Theory: Preliminary results in Novelty and Transformativeness
Luís Espírito Santo, Geraint Wiggins, Amílcar Cardoso
TL;DR
This paper proposes a Formal Creativity Theory by embedding Formal Learning Theory within creativity studies, and provides formal definitions of novelty and transformativeness to study their interaction. By using a Grey Music anecdote, it grounds the framework in artefacts, experience and fate sequences, and three conceptual spaces (inspiring, hypothetical, platonic). It presents preliminary results showing that novelty is neither sufficient nor necessary for transformativeness in general, though a set-driven subclass ties novelty to transformation. The work offers a principled, theory-driven lens for analyzing artificial creativity and outlines concrete future directions, including semantic transformativeness, typicality, aberrations, and computability considerations to guide long-term research.
Abstract
Formalizing creativity-related concepts has been a long-term goal of Computational Creativity. To the same end, we explore Formal Learning Theory in the context of creativity. We provide an introduction to the main concepts of this framework and a re-interpretation of terms commonly found in creativity discussions, proposing formal definitions for novelty and transformational creativity. This formalisation marks the beginning of a research branch we call Formal Creativity Theory, exploring how learning can be included as preparation for exploratory behaviour and how learning is a key part of transformational creative behaviour. By employing these definitions, we argue that, while novelty is neither necessary nor sufficient for transformational creativity in general, when using an inspiring set, rather than a sequence of experiences, an agent actually requires novelty for transformational creativity to occur.