Computational Creativity in the AI Era: A Research Agenda for Information Systems
TL;DR
The five articles in this Special Issue show that the promise of computational systems—in particular, generative AI—lies in configuring human and machine agency so that creative work produces ideas and artifacts that are deemed creative—that is, novel and useful—while also safeguarding the generative, effortful, accountable, and socially meaningful nature of creativity.
Abstract
This editorial presents computational creativity as a durable research program for Information Systems. Defining creativity as a structured, instrumentable, and improvable process of search, recombination, evaluation, and realization, we conceptualize computational creativity as being concerned with computational systems that model, simulate, enact, or augment the creative behavior of human creators. The five articles in this Special Issue show that the promise of computational systems—in particular, generative AI—lies in configuring human and machine agency so that creative work produces ideas and artifacts that are deemed creative—that is, novel and useful—while also safeguarding the generative, effortful, accountable, and socially meaningful nature of creativity. We translate these findings into an IS research agenda focused on process instrumentation, diversity-preserving design, agency-sensitive governance, organizational capability building for human-AI creative systems, and responsible computational creativity. The core challenge is to engineer the practices of computational creativity without forfeiting either the novelty or usefulness of the output, or human agency.
