Artificial intelligence challenges what it means to be creative

When British artist Harold Cohen met his first computer in 1968, he wondered if the machine might help solve a mystery that had long puzzled him: How can we look at a drawing, a few little scribbles, and see a face? Five years later, he devised a robotic artist called AARON to explore this idea. He equipped it with basic rules for painting and for how body parts are represented in portraiture -- and then set it loose making art. Not far behind was the composer David Cope, who coined the phrase "musical intelligence" to describe his experiments with artificial intelligence–powered composition. Cope once told me that as early as the 1960s, it seemed to him "perfectly logical to do creative things with algorithms" rather than to painstakingly draw by hand every word of a story, note of a musical composition or brush stroke of a painting.