Creative Agency: A Clearer Goal for Artificial Life in the Arts

One of the goals of artificial life in the arts is to develop systems that exhibit creativity. We argue that creativity per se is a confusing goal for artificial life systems because of the complexity of the relationship between the system, its designers and users, and the creative domain. We analyse this confusion in terms of factors a↵ecting individual human motivation in the arts, and the methods used to measure the success of artificial creative systems. We argue that an attempt to understand creative agency as a common thread in nature, human culture, human individuals and computational systems is a necessary step towards a better understanding of computational creativity. We define creative agency with respect to existing theories of creativity and consider human creative agency in terms of human social behaviour. We then propose how creative agency can be used to analyse the creativity of computational systems in artistic domains.