Creative Agents: Rethinking Agency and Creativity in Human and Artificial Systems

ABSTRACT While the notions of creativity and agency have each received considerable attention in the literature on computational systems, the connections between these two concepts have rarely been addressed. In this paper, I contribute to this debate by discussing the results of an online questionnaire aimed at testing the interactions between the attribution of agency and creativity to human and artificial subjects. Findings of the study indicate that the ascription of agentive capabilities to a subject is positively correlated to the level of creativity attributed to the process they perform. This result supports the claim that a better understanding of the steps needed in order to achieve agency can help also shed light on the development of creativity in computational systems. I conclude the paper by suggesting that the technological revolution of the last decades is compelling us to re-think concepts such as authorship, ownership, agency, and creativity that, so far, have been typically attributed to humans only, and to consider how these notions are being transformed in dynamics of interaction between humans and machines.