Hand-Made By Machines

Can machines ever be truly creative? The success of Generative AI has certainly shifted the debate, despite a baleful tendency to use this new technology to produce "slop". 

Hand-Made By Machines is a 2013 illustrated book that introduces the foundational concepts of the field of Computational Creativity.

The book, linked here as a downloadable PDF, explores these foundations by answering the following questions:

• What is (human) creativity? Can we measure it?
• How does linguistic creativity work?
• Are there rules of creativity (can have a rule-breaking activity have rules of its own)?
• What does it mean for a creative artefact be "original" and "useful"?
• Is it productive to view creativity as a search process (as in good-old-fashioned AI)?
• Are there different kinds and scales of creativity (e.g., personal versus historical)?
• Is there an important difference between mere generation and true creativity?
• How does humorous creativity allow us to find sense in nonsense?
• How does the human mind foster creativity, but sometimes hinder creativity too? 
• What are the most effective strategies for being creative, for humans or machines?