The Creativity Code: Art and Innovation in the Age of AI

by Marcus Du Sautoy

Overview

The award-winning author of The Music of the Primes explores the future of creativity and how machine learning will disrupt, enrich, and transform our understanding of what it means to be human.

Can a well-programmed machine do anything a human can—only better? Complex algorithms are choosing our music, picking our partners, and driving our investments. They can navigate more data than a doctor or lawyer and act with greater precision. For many years we’ve taken solace in the notion that they can’t create. But now that algorithms can learn and adapt, does the future of creativity belong to machines, too?

It is hard to imagine a better guide to the bewildering world of artificial intelligence than Marcus du Sautoy, a celebrated Oxford mathematician whose work on symmetry in the ninth dimension has taken him to the vertiginous edge of mathematical understanding. In The Creativity Code he considers what machine learning means for the future of creativity. The Pollockizer can produce drip paintings in the style of Jackson Pollock, Botnik spins off fanciful (if improbable) scenes inspired by J. K. Rowling, and the music-composing algorithm Emmy managed to fool a panel of Bach experts. But do these programs just mimic, or do they have what it takes to create? Du Sautoy argues that to answer this question, we need to understand how the algorithms that drive them work—and this brings him back to his own subject of mathematics, with its puzzles, constraints, and enticing possibilities.

While most recent books on AI focus on the future of work, The Creativity Code moves us to the forefront of creative new technologies and offers a more positive and unexpected vision of our future cohabitation with machines. It challenges us to reconsider what it means to be human—and to crack the creativity code.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674988132
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/15/2019
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Marcus du Sautoy is the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and the bestselling author of The Music of the Primes, Symmetry, and The Great Unknown. A trumpeter and member of an experimental theater group, he has written and presented over a dozen documentaries, including The Code and The Secret Rules of Modern Living: Algorithms. He also created the codes for Lauren Child’s Ruby Redfort mysteries. He has received the Berwick Prize, the Zeeman Medal, and the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday Prize, among other honors.

Table of Contents

1 The Lovelace Test 1

2 Three Types of Creativity 7

3 Ready Steady Go 16

4 Algorithms, the Secret to Modern Life 40

5 From Top-Down to Bottom-Up 61

6 Algorithmic Evolution 75

7 Painting by Numbers 92

8 Learning from the Masters 115

9 The Art of Mathematics 140

10 The Mathematicians Telescope 158

11 Music: The Process of Sounding Mathematics 174

12 The Song-Writing Formula 199

13 DeepMathematics 218

14 Language Games 237

15 Let AI Tell You a Story 258

16 Why We Create: A Meeting of Minds 279

Selected Bibliography 289

Acknowledgments 297

Index 299

Editorial Reviews

In a classic 1950 paper, Alan Turing asked: ‘Can machines think?’ …Du Sautoy’s test is different but no less challenging: can machines be genuinely creative? The interest, just as it was for Turing, lies not so much in finding a definitive answer but in examining what the question itself might mean.

Prospect

Technology is already controlling more and more of our lives every day, sometimes in ways we barely stop to think about. As programs slowly do more of our thinking, Du Sautoy reassuringly insists that there are, indeed, some ways in which technology can never replace human ingenuity.

Book Riot - Emily Wenstrom

Makes the case for why algorithms could match Beethoven or Picasso—or for that matter, the creative departments of advertising agencies.

Marketing Week

Algorithms are often seen as opaque or dangerous forces, fueling our fears of apocalypse/the ghost in the machine. But if art is an early warning system and artists the experts at making the invisible visible, then Marcus du Sautoy is, in this remarkable consideration of the limitations and possibilities of AI, the light-bearer, illuminating not only the work of coders and creators, but the mathematics of chaos that underpin art.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

As machines outsmart us in ever more domains, we can at least comfort ourselves that one area will remain sacrosanct and uncomputable: human creativity. Or can we? …In his fascinating exploration of the nature of creativity, Marcus du Sautoy questions many of those assumptions. The Oxford mathematician, who is as adept at explaining complex theories in prose as he is on television, argues that so much of what we consider to be creativity consists of super-smart synthesis rather than the flash of inspiration.

Financial Times - John Thornhill

Algorithms that not only duplicate human skills but learn from their mistakes are what define artificial intelligence. But du Sautoy considers the possibility of reaching another stage: machine creativity, technology that is itself capable of innovation.

Inside Higher Ed

Fact-packed and funny, questioning what we mean by creative and unsettling the script about what it means to be human, The Creativity Code is a brilliant travel guide to the coming world of AI.

Jeanette Winterson

A wide-ranging and fact-packed tour d’horizon of current applications of artificial intelligence in mathematics and the arts.

The Guardian

The Creativity Code is only partly a book about AI art. It is as much about how AI thinks and how it does mathematics—du Sautoy’s own special subject. And on these topics, he is thoughtful and illuminating.

Sunday Times

Argues reassuringly that true creativity belongs to humanity…A computer may best any human at calculation, but it lacks that snippet of ‘human code’ that lets us know when an idea is not just new but meaningful.

New York Times Book Review

We seem to have convinced ourselves that higher-level creativity and intuition are uniquely human traits. Why? Why could a machine one day not create a truly original work of art, write a moving poem, compose an opera, or even discover a mathematical theorem? The answers, in this compelling and thought-provoking book by mathematician and musician Marcus du Sautoy, can be found by breaking down what it actually means to be creative.

Jim Al-Khalili

An interesting, reader-friendly discussion of how well computers can be creative.

Choice

Absorbing…Eloquent and illuminating.

Nature

Fascinating… If all the experiences, hopes, dreams, visions, lusts, loves, and hatreds that shape the human imagination amount to nothing more than a ‘code,’ then sooner or later a machine will crack it. Indeed, du Sautoy assembles an eclectic array of evidence to show how that’s happening even now.

The Times

An ambitious meditation on the meaning of creativity and consciousness.

Wall Street Journal

Fascinating… If all the experiences, hopes, dreams, visions, lusts, loves, and hatreds that shape the human imagination amount to nothing more than a ‘code,’ then sooner or later a machine will crack it. Indeed, du Sautoy assembles an eclectic array of evidence to show how that’s happening even now.

The Times

Absorbing…Eloquent and illuminating.

Nature Lib