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As machines of various sorts and configurations encroach on human abilities in areas like manufacturing, decision making, communication, transportation, etc., the one remaining bulwark of human exceptionalism appears to be creativity and artistry. But maybe not for long. There are already technologies that can produce what appear to be creative work. There is, for example, Shimon, a marimba-playing jazz-bot from Georgia Tech University that can improvise with human musicians in real time (Hoffman and Weinberg 2011); Experiments in Musical Intelligence or EMI, a PC-based digital composer that can create new classical music scores that are (by some accounts) virtually indistinguishable from the master works of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart (Cope 2001); The Painting Fool, an algorithmic painter that aspires to be “taken seriously as a creative artist in its own right” (Colton 2012, 16); and Narrative Science’s Quill and Automated Insight’s Wordsmith, natural language generation systems that are designed to write original, human-readable stories by drawing down and reassembling data residing in the cloud (Dörr and Hollnbuchner 2016). Consequently, it appears that what we have called “creativity” and “artistry” may not be as uniquely human as one might have initially thought. This special section of Philosophy and Technology examines the philosophical opportunities, challenges, and repercussions of increasingly creative machines. In one way or another, the three essays collected here seek to address and respond to one seemingly simple question: Can machines create art?

DOI: 10.1007/s13347-017-0281-3

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