This paper offers a critical survey and analysis of empirical studies on creativity, with emphasis on how imagination plays a role in the creative process. It takes as a foil the romantic view that, given features like novelty, incubation, and insight, we should be skeptical about the prospects for naturalistic explanation of creativity. It rebuts this skepticism by first distinguishing stages or operations in the creative process. It then works through various behavioral and neural studies, and corresponding philosophical theorizing, that (...) concern the preparation, generation, insight, and evaluation stages of creative processes. The result is not a complete explanation of creativity, but it identifies an explanatory path towards such an explanation, including the features of creativity that motivate that skepticism. (shrink)

The question of whether machines can be creative has been at the centre of debates among scholars and practitioners well before the inception of artificial intelligence (AI) as a recognised field of research. This paper reviews how some of the key thinkers in the fields of creativity and AI have approached this question, contextualising their views within the ebbs and flows of AI technological developments, from the 1950s until now. The thread of this overview is Margaret Boden's identification of novelty, (...) surprisingness and value, as the three cardinal features of creativity. This review will retrace the steps of the quest of artificial intelligence researchers as they strive to replicate each of these three properties within human-made machines. The paper closes with a reflection on how the third of these properties, value, prompts us to consider societal challenges raised by the widespread adoption of AI for creativity that transcend the question: ‘Can AI be creative?’. (shrink)