From the literature it seems best to consider "creativity" as two elements:
- The "creative" process, which is about manifesting an idea through craft
- And the "imagination" which comes up with the idea as a mental "image" in the first place.
See Gaut (2003), and Boden (1998) who refers to these as H-creativity (new to the history of the world) and P-creativity (new just to the psych of the progenitor).
There are thousands of papers on computational creativity, but hardly any on computational imagination!
Computational Creativity Examples
Here are some examples of computational creativity which could be readily added to a virtual human.
BRUTUS, a story-making and telling machine (Bringsjord, 1999):
At the defense, Dave thought that he eloquently summarized Chapter 3 of his dissertation. There were two questions, one from Professor Rodman and one from Dr. Teer; Dave answered both, apparently to everyone's satisfaction. There were no further objections.
Professor Rodman signed. He slid the tome to Teer; she too signed, and then slid it in front of Hart.
Hart didn't move.
``Ed?" Rodman said.
Hart still sat motionless. Dave felt slightly dizzy.
``Edward, are you going to sign?"
Later, Hart sat alone in his office, in his big leather chair, saddened by Dave's failure. He tried to think of ways he could help Dave achieve his dream.
The Painting Fool project (Colton & Wiggins, 2012)
The WASP (Wishful Automatic Spanish Poet) generator of poetry (Gervás, 2018)
The current interest in affectively driven algorithmic composition (AAC) which uses computers to generate music with emotional or affective qualities, such as in the work of Williams (2015) and Scirea (2017), the latter with MetaCompose (presentation and demo at http://msci.itu.dk/presentations/primal/#/1).
Loughran and O’Neill (2017) analysed submissions to the International Joint Workshops in Computational Creativity over a period of 12 years (IJWCC) and International Computational Creativity Conferences (ICCC) and identified that across 353 papers the most popular areas for computational creativity were Music, Other (covering a range from Cocktails to Choreography), Imagery, and Language (including Story and Literature), with Games, Humor, Sound and Math further down the list.
Artificial Imagination
If we ever do find something worth posting around artificial imagination we'll add it here!