Stakeholder groups in computational creativity research and practice

The notion that software could be independently and usefully creative is becoming more commonplace in scientific, cultural, business and public circles. It is not fanciful to imagine creative software embedded in society in the short to medium term, acting as collaborators and autonomous creative agents for much societal benefit. Technologically, there is still some way to go to enable Artificial Intelligence methods to create artefacts and ideas of value, and to get software to do so in interesting and engaging ways. There are also a number of sociological hurdles to overcome in getting society to accept software as being truly creative, and we concentrate on those here. We discuss the various communities that can be considered stakeholders in the perception of computers being creative or not. In particular, we look in detail at three sets of stakeholders, namely the general public, Computational Creativity researchers and fellow creatives. We put forward various philosophical points which we argue will shape the way in which society accepts creative software. We make various claims along the way about how people perceive software as being creative or not, which we believe should be addressed with scientific experimentation, and we call on the Computational Creativity research community to do just that.