Addressing the “Why?” in computational creativity: A non-anthropocentric, minimal model of intentional creative agency

Generally, computational creativity (CC) systems cannot explain why they are being creative, without ultimately referring back to the values and goals of their designer. Answering the “why?” would allow for the attribution of intentional agency, and likely lead to a stronger perception of creativity. Enactive artificial intelligence, a framework inspired by autopoietic enactive cognitive science, equips us with the necessary conditions for a value function to reflect a system's own intrinsic goals. We translate the framework's general claims to CC and ground a system's creative activity intrinsically in the maintenance of its identity. We relate to candidate computational principles to realise enactive artificial agents, thus laying the foundations for a minimal, non-anthropocentric model of intentional creative agency. We discuss first implications for the design and evaluation of CC, and address why human-level intentional creative agency is so hard to achieve. We ultimately propose a new research direction in CC, where intentional creative agency is addressed bottom up.