Conference Highlights

I’m back from the Fourteenth International Conference on Computational Creativity. It was a whirlwind of a week. My scholarly contribution was minimal, but it exists. My ability to engage – socially, professionally, critically – felt higher than it’s ever been. My spoons, alas, were not infinite. I have a lot to unpack about how this went and about what I want for the next few years in my scholarly career (it still feels presumptuous to assume that I have things like a “scholarly career”), but I am tired and I don’t want to unpack it now. What I want to do is jot down a few memorable moments and share them with you. Not an exhaustive account of the week, but a highlight reel.

ICCC has always been a weird little misfit of a scholarly community. It’s not where people go when they are building LLMs and disrupting the world. There’s a lot of discourse about what exactly the community’s goals are, or should be – but in reality there are multiple goals. There are people trying to do a cognitive science and test hypotheses about creativity. There are people who are sentimental about Strong AI and who sincerely do want a computer to become an “autonomous creator in its own right.” There are people just mucking around and “making things that make things” because it’s fun; there are people waxing philosophical about what creativity means in the first place. I like it, personally – it feels cozy, eclectic, sometimes a little annoying in a way that endears me.

Anyway, highlights.

(Read the full post on Substack)