Generative AI, Creativity, and Autonomy: Reflections on Boden

Margaret “Maggie” Boden was a pioneer in the study not only of creativity, but generally in computing, artificial intelligence and artificial life research. She championed the importance of computational concepts and artificial intelligence research to understanding human creativity. In spite of that enthusiasm, however, Boden was consistently sceptical about even the possibility of genuine AI creativity, up until her last published comments on the topic in 2018. Unfortunately, Boden never had the chance to engage in any substantial way with today’s GPT systems such as ChatGPT or Claude. This paper asks, simply, what would Maggie say about these systems, if she could, now? Or, perhaps more substantively, it asks what she should have said given her overall catalog of views. Included in that catalog is a sophisticated notion of autonomy, developed in the context of biology and artificial life research, which takes the form of self-organization. This notion is applied to today’s GPT systems to answer (cautiously and endearingly) on Maggie’s behalf and offer some prescriptions for future creativity research.