Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (website)

In order to decide which entries of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to read, I went to ‘Browse’, clicked ‘Chronological’ and scrolled through a list of entries. I found one titled Creativity and decided to read it. Here are my thoughts:

Is creativity a virtue?

If nothing more, a virtue is a trait that is good or valuable. Creativity, although it could be
used immorally, certainly has the potential to create valuable products.
However, many philosophers believe that there is a lot more to virtuous traits than this.
Aristotle thought that for actions to be virtuous, the person doing them must know that they
are doing virtuous actions and choose them “from a firm and unchanging state”. I think
creativity sometimes adheres to these criteria, but not always. Aristotle’s conditions would
require a person’s creativity to persist throughout their lives in order to count as a virtue, so
inconsistent creativity is not virtuous. Furthermore, people are often motivated by external
factors such as praise and financial gain when choosing to be creative. This opposes
Aristotle’s criterion that a virtuous action must be done “for its own sake”, making it another
situation in which creativity is not a virtue. Any creativity which occurs unintentionally must
also be discredited.

So what about deliberate and enduring creativity that is demonstrated purely as a result of
intrinsic motivation? In my opinion, the fact that such a detailed distinction must be made
between two theoretical types of creativity suggests that it is not truly a virtue at all. In
contrast, we can say that generosity is a virtue because only consistent and selfless
generosity is true generosity. But we cannot say that a poem was not creative just because
it was written with fame in mind, or because the writer only wrote one poem in their life.
Therefore, creativity is not a virtue in the Aristotelian sense because it does not align with the
definition of virtuous actions.

Can computers be creative?

I think there is an important difference between a computer that appears to be creative and a
computer which is truly creative. There are plenty of computers out there which behave as if
they were creative. The computers only have to produce things which are both new and
valuable.

However, to be genuinely creative, computers must meet more criteria. There is no
consensus as to what these criteria ought to be, however many theorists assert that a
creative process must be surprising, original, spontaneous and/or new. First of all, I think that
computers can be surprising. For example, the chess grandmaster must have been unable
to predict the moves of the computer that defeated him. Also, current technologies are
continuously developing and increasingly show the potential of spontaneity. As for the
concept of novelty, this is clearly possible, as computers have created countless new pieces
of music, writing and artwork.

So what about originality? It is difficult to say whether computers are capable of being
inventors of entirely unique things. I think that the answer will become more clear in the
future, but currently it is neither a definite yes or no. Anyhow, even without consciousness,
understanding and intention, computers seem to be able to fulfil many of the requirements of
a creative process. For this reason, I believe computers can be creative but that we
shouldn’t expect them to operate in the same way as the human brain. A computer’s creative
process doesn’t have to be exactly like ours in order to contribute to the world.