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This paper examines the question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) systems can be creative, approached from the dual perspective of a researcher trained in electrical engineering, pattern recognition, machine learning, and neural networks, who has also spent most of his life engaged in the arts as actor, stage and film director, writer, composer, and visual artist, and in philosophy. Drawing on Margaret Boden’s foundational framework — both her three properties of creativity (novelty, surprise, and value) and her three types of creative processes (combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational) — the paper argues that AI systems are structurally incapable of creativity in its strongest sense. While they exhibit genuine capability in the domain of combinatorial creativity, they are significantly bounded in exploratory creativity, and fundamentally incapable of transformational creativity. The paper further argues that the most important limitation of current AI systems is not the absence of novelty per se, but the absence of any mechanism for serendipity, accident, or the unexpected — all of which play a central role in the phenomenology of creativity — and the absence of any subject position from which to recognize and welcome such chance events. The paper concludes by proposing a model of human-AI creative collaboration that is both realistic and generative, illustrated by several concrete experiments. The paper is itself a demonstration of the thesis it advances: it was composed through a deliberate human-AI collaborative process, which is described in the methodological note that opens it.
The French academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825 – 1905) used real European butterfly models with vivid eyespots to depict the wings of mythological figures such as Zephyr, Flora, Eros, and Psyche in his paintings. Here we analyze these works of art, identify the butterfly species depicted, and discuss the potential symbolic meanings behind these paintings.
The mirror’s history, spanning thousands of years, has led people to view it as an aesthetic object, an optical instrument, a source of knowledge or illusion, and even a metaphor for the soul. The first part of this article explores the various manifestations of mirror consciousness, as it appears in certain animals and in the foundational myth of Narcissus. The following section discusses the technical evolution of mirrors, the diversity of their uses, and the ways in which artists have begun to appropriate them. Next, the article addresses the spiritual dimension of the mirror, followed by its persistent presence in contemporary art, where it reflects the uncertainties and fragmentations associated with postmodernity. Stepping through the mirror (in the wake of literary adventures such as Alice’s) thus proves to be an endeavor as desirable as it is perilous. And while nowadays, the deep universe reveals itself more and more to giant telescopes, the question of infinity raised by the mirror continues to resurface, in contemporary art as well as in philosophy and literature.
2026
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