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Creativity: The Human Brain in the Age of Innovation
Goldberg's 2018 direct engagement with the question of whether computers can be creative — and his nuanced answer: they can produce outputs humans judge as novel and valuable, but through a process structurally different from the coordinated six-system performance that produces human creative work.
Creativity: The Human Brain in the Age of Innovation extends Goldberg's framework into the contested terrain of artificial creativity. The book develops the six-system decomposition of creative performance and uses it to diagnose what current AI systems can and cannot do. Computers excel at pattern-based generation at scale. They can produce outputs that humans rate as creative. But the process by which they produce those outputs — statistical interpolation within training corpora — is structurally different from the process by which the human brain produces genuinely novel responses to unprecedented problems. The difference is not one of degree but of kind: the difference between deploying an existing template and constructing a new one.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book situates AI creativity within the broader framework of human creativity, refusing both the dismissive claim that AI cannot be creative and the enthusiastic claim
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