By Giovanni Emanuele Corazza, editor of The Cyber-Creativity Process: How Humans Co-Create with Artificial Intelligence 

All living species have culture, but Homo Sapiens represents the only case in which culture rapidly evolves, and it does so at an exponential pace. This fact, which has held true since paleolithic times, can be explained by our capacity to learn from the past and to use extant knowledge to creatively generate many original ideas, in a distributed fashion across societies. A few of these ideas survive and are merged into our shared domains, only to become ingredients for further episodes of generation and exploration of possibilities. In short, our culture has evolved, and continues to grow, through the collective expression of human creativity. It is reasonable to assume that it is for this very reason that creativity has always been considered to be a defining characteristic for humanity. However, it should be recognized that several scholars have also studied creativity outside of human realms: in fact, it is possible to recognize creative behavior both in animals and in plants, and even inanimate matter (when kept far away from equilibrium states) can evolve in fundamentally unpredictable (hence original) trajectories. Creative phenomena in the material, biological, and psycho-social layers of complexity can be integrated in what is identified as the dynamic universal creative process (DUCP). Still, our conscience, intentionality, free-will and goal-directed social behavior have always been considered sufficient to draw a sharp separation line between human creativity and any other form of novelty generation.

Whereas creativity can be applied to all fields of knowledge, in the last three centuries the technical domain has witnessed most of the inventions and innovations that have transformed jobs, professions, social relations, and power dynamics. In fact, this is reflected in the name attributed to the modern phases of our society: Industrial Society, Information Society, and Post-Information Society. Following a positivistic view of technology, new engineering solutions have been pursued and implemented in all possible fields, without questioning their potential negative side-effects or posing any ethical concern a-priori. Undoubtedly, technical progress has been astonishing; still we know that this has come at a price in terms of pollution, climate change, and various forms of social inequalities and alienation. But until the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), none of these innovations have ever put into question the dominating role of humanity over “machines”. 

In the Post-Information Society, characterized by hyper-levels of artificial intelligence and hyper-connectivity through the Internet of Things, the transformation of our lives promises to be so radical and all-encompassing that the question is now legitimate: how do humans remain in control over the intelligent machines they conceived and realized? Further, in view of the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (Gen-AI) algorithms and tools, can we still consider creativity as a field under our primary dominance? Although science fiction has in a sense prepared us for several decades to a future in which machines would become as intelligent as humans, or more, now that this idea is rapidly emerging as a threatening reality, it appears to be natural to feel unprepared, irrespective of one’s level of expertise in the subject. 

In particular, there is an urgent call to start studying and understanding cyber-creativity, the emerging study of phenomena characterized by the collaboration in creative tasks between one or more human agents and one or more artificial agents. This is a new layer of complexity to be integrated in the DUCP: artificial creativity. Cyber-creativity includes the entire spectrum of the creative instances in the Post-Information Society, characterized by a continuum in the degree of collaboration between humans and machines: from full autonomy of humans to full autonomy of machines. This shall evidently be an interdisciplinary effort, receiving contributions as a minimum from philosophy, psychology, computer science, cybernetics, engineering, and sociology. Cyber-creativity shall have its own theoretical framework, and it shall be studied both in its sociocultural and its individual dimensions, considering the process, the agents, the hybrid teams, and the way cyber-creative products are perceived. Cyber-creativity is bound to intersect all professional domains and all educational experiences, thus affecting human development in a very significant way. Finally, ethical concerns related to cyber-creativity shall be addressed from the outset, as it is already clear that the astonishing potential benefits of Gen-AI go along with equally dramatic potential misuses by the dark side of creativity. 

All in all, cyber-creativity promises to become a primary field of scientific enquiry in the Post-Information Society. 

Giovanni Emanuele Corazza is Full Professor at the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, Italy, founder of the Marconi Institute for Creativity (MIC), and Member of the Board of the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation (ISSCI). His interdisciplinary research interests intersect the fields of creativity, anticipation, and ethical technological transitions.