Black-box creativity and generative artifical intelligence

The rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence applications poses a number of significant challenges for the ways in which we organise our social, cultural and working lives. As we have explored in Business Information Review over recent years, new technologies promise to transform existing workplace routines, encroaching on professional roles just as it has already encroached on routine occupations (Kirkwood, 2018; Richardson, 2020; Tredinnick, 2017). Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses new problems in the evaluation of information and news, and in understanding the role of disinformation in social discourse (Tredinnick and Laybats, 2023). Artifical Intelligence facilitates new forms of cybercrime (Tredinnick and Laybats, 2023) and poses new ethical dilemmas about the use of technology (Carter, 2018; 2020). But while we have tended to focus on the ways in which technology may transform the contexts within which we live and work, generative artificial intelligence has also been silently rewiring how we conceptualise the human voice, agency, and creativity. This more subtle challenge is in many ways of greater profundity. Creativity has been widely understood as a distinctly human characteristic (Carruthers, 2012); other species can be said to engage in creative behaviour but none of this behaviour approaches the complexity and productivity of human creativity (Gabora and Kaufman, 2010). Yet as we move into an era where creative acts fall ever more comfortably within the province of generative AI, the ways in which we think about creativity and its relationship to the human mind is bound to shift. It is a truism that emergent technologies are generally met with a mixture of enthusiasm about their transformative potential, and apprehension about their negative social effects. The expansion of printing and literacy in the 18th century and steam press of the 19th were met by widespread misgivings about the impact of popular literature on the morals and behaviour of a newly literate mass public. Brantlinger for example has written that for many lateVictorian intellectuals: