The very idea, it is often said, is intrinsically absurd: computers cannot create, because they can do only what they are programmed to do.
The first person to publish this argument was Lady Ada Lovelace, the close friend of Charles Babbage — whose mid-nineteenth-century ‘Analytical Engine’ was, in essence, a design for a digital computer. Although convinced that Babbage’s Analytical Engine was in principle able to ‘compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent’, Countess Lovelace declared: ‘The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform’. Any elaborate pieces of music emanating from the Analytical Engine would therefore be credited not to the engine, but to the engineer.
If Lady Ada’s remark means merely that a computer can do only what its program enables it to do, it is correct, and important. But if it is intended as an argument denying any interesting link between computers and creativity, it is too quick and too simple.
We must distinguish four different questions, which are often confused with each other. I call them Lovelace-questions, because many people would respond to them (with a dismissive ‘No!’) by using the argument cited above.
The first Lovelace-question is whether computational ideas can help us understand how human creativity is possible. The second is whether computers (now or in the future) could ever do things which at least appear to be creative. The third is whether a computer could ever appear to recognize creativity — in poems written by human poets, for instance. And the fourth is whether computers themselves could ever really be creative (as opposed to merely producing apparently creative performance whose originality is wholly due to the human programmer).
— Boden, Margaret A. The Creative Mind. Myths and Mechanisms. 1990. Second ed. London: Routledge, 2004.
