How Does Embodiment Affect the Human Perception of Computational Creativity? An Experimental Study Framework

Which factors influence the human assessment of creativity exhibited by a computational system is a core question of computational creativity (CC) research. Recently, the system's embodiment has been put forward as such a factor, but empirical studies of its effect are lacking. To this end, we propose an experimental framework which isolates the effect of embodiment on the perception of creativity from its effect on creativity per se. We not only manipulate the system's embodiment, but also the perceptual evidence as the basis for the human creativity assessment. We motivate the core framework with embodiment and perceptual evidence as independent and the creative process as controlled variable, and we provide recommendations on measuring the assessment of creativity as dependent variable. We hope the framework will inspire others to study the human perception of embodied CC in a principled manner.

Embodiment and Computational Creativity

We conjecture that creativity and the perception of creativity are, at least to some extent, shaped by embodiment. This makes embodiment highly relevant for Computational Creativity (CC) research, but existing research is scarce and the use of the concept highly ambiguous. We overcome this situation by means of a systematic review and a prescriptive analysis of publications at the International Conference on Computational Creativity. We adopt and extend an established typology of embodiment to resolve ambiguity through identifying and comparing different usages of the concept. We collect, contextualise and highlight opportunities and challenges in embracing embodiment in CC as a reference for research, and put forward important directions to further the embodied CC research programme.