“A brilliant travel guide to the coming world of AI.”
—Jeanette Winterson

What does it mean to be creative? Can creativity be trained? Is it uniquely human, or could AI be considered creative?

Mathematical genius and exuberant polymath Marcus du Sautoy plunges us into the world of artificial intelligence and algorithmic learning in this essential guide to the future of creativity. He considers the role of pattern and imitation in the creative process and sets out to investigate the programs and programmers—from Deep Mind and the Flow Machine to Botnik and WHIM—who are seeking to rival or surpass human innovation in gaming, music, art, and language. A thrilling tour of the landscape of invention, The Creativity Code explores the new face of creativity and the mysteries of the human code.

“As machines outsmart us in ever more domains, we can at least comfort ourselves that one area will remain sacrosanct and uncomputable: human creativity. Or can we?…In his fascinating exploration of the nature of creativity, Marcus du Sautoy questions many of those assumptions.”
—Financial Times

“Fascinating…If all the experiences, hopes, dreams, visions, lusts, loves, and hatreds that shape the human imagination amount to nothing more than a ‘code,’ then sooner or later a machine will crack it. Indeed, du Sautoy assembles an eclectic array of evidence to show how that’s happening even now.”
—The Times

Contextualizes literary texts and other cultural artifacts generated using the latest technological techniques.

The possibilities of generated cultural production have undergone fundamental changes in recent years, leading to a rethinking of existing approaches to the text and the artwork as such. To grasp this process, Zuzana Husárová and Karel Piorecký propose the term “neural network culture,” which captures a wide range of generative practices and reception mechanisms. The Culture of Neural Networks contextualizes the phenomenon of literary texts and other artifacts generated using the latest technological techniques. The generation of literary texts using neural networks is part of a broader cultural process, to which this publication formulates a position through the lens of literary science, media theory, and art theory. 

The scholarly debate over this topic has been inconsistent—on the one hand, it underestimates the diachronic connections between generated texts and the tradition of experimental and conceptual literature; on the other hand, it does not sufficiently clarify the new-generation procedures and the contribution of human and technological actors in them. Therefore, Husárová and Piorecký propose the notion of synthetic textual art, which reflects the specific roles of the different actors involved in generative practice and its intermedial nature. In doing so, they approach the topic from both historical and theoretical perspectives, analyzing the current state of generative practice in all three basic literary types and in the intermedial space using selected foreign and Czech-Slovak projects. This state of affairs is often distorted in media discourse and even mythicized in terms of the capabilities of “artificial intelligence”; therefore, a critical analysis of this media discourse is essential. Finally, the authors summarize the implications of this stage in the development of generative practice on creativity theory and literary theory.

Neural networks are an exciting technology of growing importance in real industrial situations, particularly in control and systems. This book aims to give a detailed appreciation of the use of neural nets in these applications; it is aimed particularly at those with a control or systems background who wish to gain an insight into the technology in the context of real applications.