Attributing Creative Agency: Are we doing it right?

When contemplating the creativity of computational systems, a host of factors have been taken into consideration, many of which people have attempted to measure or otherwise operationalise: novelty, value, P-creativity versus H-creativity, exploration versus transformation, the subjective evaluation and contextualisation of the artefact, and so on. Whilst of equal importance, the systematic and rigorous attribution of creative agency to different actors in the production of a specific output has been given less attention. It is common to make the simplifying assumption that the most direct contributor to an artefact is that artefact’s sole author, but arguably this is never the case: all human creativity occurs in the context of networks of mutual influence, including a cumulative pool of knowledge. This paper looks at how we might better formalise creative authorship such that for any artefact, a set of agents could be precisely attributed with their relative contributions to the existence of that entity. It asks only what the nature of this formalisation should be, and concludes that a more critical approach is needed to the creative agency of human actors, and thus the expected creative