On impact and evaluation in computational creativity: a discussion of the Turing Test and an alternative proposal

Abstract. Computational Creativity is the AI subfield in which we study how to build computational models of creative thought in science and the arts. From an engineering perspective, it is desirable to have concrete measures for assessing the progress made from one version of a program to another, or for comparing and contrasting different software systems for the same creative task. We describe the Turing Test and versions of it which have been used in order to measure progress in Computational Creativity. We show that the versions proposed thus far lack the important aspect of interaction, without which much of the power of the Turing Test is lost. We argue that the Turing Test is largely inappropriate for the purposes of evaluation in Computational Creativity, since it attempts to homogenise creativity into a single (human) style, does not take into account the importance of background and contextual information for a creative act, encourages superficial, uninteresting advances in front-ends, and