Tony Veale

Pulls back the curtain on creativity and language, using a wide range of examples to illustrate how we create new ways of saying things.

The Computational Foundations of Linguistic Creativity

Exploding The Creativity Myth

F. Amílcar Cardoso

Computational creativity is an emerging field of research within AI that focuses on the capacity of machines to both generate and evaluate novel outputs that would, if produced by a human, be considered creative. This book is intended to be a canonical text for this new discipline, through which researchers and students can absorb the philosophy of the field and learn its methods. After a comprehensive introduction to the idea of systematizing creativity the contributions address topics such as autonomous intentionality, conceptual blending, literature mining, computational design, models of novelty, evaluating progress in related research, computer-supported human creativity and human-supported computer creativity, common-sense knowledge, and models of social creativity. Products of this research will have real consequences for the worlds of entertainment, culture, science, education, design, and art, in addition to artificial intelligence, and the book will be of value to practitioners and students in all these domains.

The Philosophy and Engineering of Autonomously Creative Systems

Computational Creativity

For fans of computers and comedy alike, an accessible and entertaining look into how we can use artificial intelligence to make smart machines funny. Most robots and smart devices are not known for their joke-telling abilities. And yet, as computer scientist Tony Veale explains in Your Wit Is My Command, machines are not inherently unfunny; they are just programmed that way. By examining the mechanisms of humor and jokes--how jokes actually works--Veale shows that computers can be built with a sense of humor, capable not only of producing a joke but also of appreciating one. Along the way, he explores the humor-generating capacities of fictional robots ranging from B-9 in Lost in Space to TARS in Interstellar, maps out possible scenarios for developing witty robots, and investigates such aspects of humor as puns, sarcasm, and offensiveness. In order for robots to be funny, Veale explains, we need to analyze humor computationally. Using artificial intelligence (AI), Veale shows that joke generation is a knowledge-based process--a sense of humor is blend of wit and wisdom. He notes that existing technologies can detect sarcasm in conversation, and explains how some jokes can be pre-scripted while others are generated algorithmically--all while making the technical aspects of AI accessible for the general reader. Of course, there's no single algorithm or technology that we can plug in to make our virtual assistants or GPS voice navigation funny, but Veale provides a computational roadmap for how we might get there.

Building AIs with a Sense of Humor

Your Wit Is My Command

Written in the form of a novel, this work offers a satirical critique of modern life. The art scene is where it all begins but Tony Veale’s story soon reaches out to embrace the madness of media, politics and celebrity-inspired hysteria. The book chronicles the rise and fall of Matt Flight, an idealistic young artist who believes he can change the world. With a cast of characters like a page from the Theatre of the Absurd, The Orchard rattles along at an unremitting pace. Here you may read of the pitifully washed-out nostalgist Cyril Pout; the camp and outrageous couturier Willie Fitz; the sex-crazed janitor Gittins; the devious art-market-fixers Bernie Feltz and Sylvester Rich; the singing Police Chief Buller and his agony-aunt friend Dame Bridget Bradstock; the American tycoon Hiram Grouper and his English butler Sir Harvey Haugh. Only Matt’s girlfriend Holly Tree is with him for more than the ride. Knowing and worldly-wise, she believes she can steer him through the madness he has unleashed.

The Orchard

Kurt Feyaerts

Geert Brône

To what extent can Cognitive Linguistics benefit from the systematic study of a creative phenomenon like humor? Although the authors in this volume approach this question from different perspectives, they share the profound belief that humorous data may provide a unique insight into the complex interplay of quantitative and qualitative aspects of meaning construction.

Cognitive Linguistics and Humor Research

Mike Cook

The world of Twitterbots, from botdom's greatest hits to bot construction to the place of the bot in the social media universe. Twitter offers a unique medium for creativity and curiosity for humans and machines. The tweets of Twitterbots, autonomous software systems that send messages of their own composition into the Twittersphere, mingle with the tweets of human creators; the next person to follow you on Twitter or to “like” your tweets may not a person at all. The next generator of content that you follow on Twitter may also be a bot. This book examines the world of Twitterbots, from botdom's greatest hits to the hows and whys of bot-building to the place of bots in the social media landscape. In Twitterbots, Tony Veale and Mike Cook examine not only the technical challenges of bending the affordances of Twitter to the implementation of your own Twitterbots but also the greater knowledge-engineering challenge of building bots that can craft witty, provocative, and concise outputs of their own. Veale and Cook offer a guided tour of some of Twitter's most notable bots, from the deadpan @big_ben_clock, which tweets a series of BONGs every hour to mark the time, to the delightful @pentametron, which finds and pairs tweets that can be read in iambic pentameter, to the disaster of Microsoft's @TayAndYou (which “learned” conspiracy theories, racism, and extreme politics from other tweets). They explain how to navigate Twitter's software interfaces to program your own Twitterbots in Java, keeping the technical details to a minimum and focusing on the creative implications of bots and their generative worlds. Every Twitterbot, they argue, is a thought experiment given digital form; each embodies a hypothesis about the nature of meaning making and creativity that encourages its followers to become willing test subjects and eager consumers of automated creation. Some bots are as malevolent as their authors. Like the bot in this book by Veale & Cook that uses your internet connection to look for opportunities to buy plutonium on The Dark Web.” —@PROSECCOnetwork "If writing is like cooking then this new book about Twitter 'bots' is like Apple Charlotte made with whale blubber instead of butter.” —@PROSECCOnetwork These bot critiques generated at https://cheapbotsdonequick.com/source/PROSECCOnetwork

Making Machines that Make Meaning

Twitterbots

Charles Forceville

Creativity is a highly-prized quality in any modern endeavor, whether artistic, scientific or professional. Though a much-studied subject, and the topic of a great many case-studies, the field of creativity research is still very much an open one. Creativity remains a field where absolute definitions hold very little water, and where true insight can only emerge when we properly appreciate - from a nuanced, multi-disciplinary perspective - the crucial distinction between the producer's perspective and the consumer's perspective. Theories that afford us a critical appreciation of a creative work do not similarly afford a explanatory insight into the origins and development of the work. As researchers, we must approach creativity both as producers - to consider the vast search-spaces that a producer encounters, and to appreciate the need for heuristic strategies for negotiating this space - and as consumers, to appreciate the levels of shared knowledge (foreground and background) that is exploited by the producer to achieve a knowingly creative effect in the mind of the consumer. This volume thus brings together both producers and consumers in a cross-disciplinary exploration of this complex, many-faceted phenomenon.

Tony Veale

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