Encouraging p-creative behaviour with computational curiosity

Abstract

A concept, design or other artefact is p-creative when it is simultaneously novel and valuable for a specific individual. This is defined by contrast to h-creative artefacts, which are novel and valuable for a society as a whole. When we talk about p-creativity in computational systems we usually mean that something is creative to the system itself: the system has its own experiences and goals, and with them judges novelty and value. We propose an alternative approach aimed at simulating what a specific human user will find p-creative in order to stimulate that user towards pcreative behaviour. We define a framework for simulating curiosity, explore several domains in which it could be applied, and describe some preliminary results from a system designed to suggest papers for students to read that they would find surprising. We end the paper with a discussion of how this model can be extended to generate framing narratives that combine content from different artefacts that encourages p-creative behaviour.