Abstract:
Do robots need creativity? I will share my stance that they do need creativity to solve general problems and support human values. Physical AI is a type of AI that enables robots to perceive and interact with a physical world. Trendy approaches in physical AI such as Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models directly map the observations to actions where robots make decisions dominantly based on sensed information. While sensing is crucial for understanding the current physical environments, this paradigm of physical AI is fundamentally limited to support general tasks where humans see around corners and solve problems creatively based on not only what they can observe now but also various predictions of the latent spatiotemporal and social contexts. I will illustrate the examples where robots without creativity can fail to fulfill even simple goals and how we can develop physical AI for creative problem solving.
If equipped with creative physical AI, can such robots promote human creativity as in creating arts? Generative AI has brought us numerous types of convenience in the digital art world. To create artifacts in the real world, creative physical AI is needed, for instance, to preserve traditional craftsmanship such as wood carving or claymation, which faces declining participation due to its labor-intensive nature. More broadly, our innovations in creative physical AI aim to encourage people to participate in more creative activities such as educational and therapeutic art sessions. I would like to invite the audience to think about how we can use technologies to promote human creativity for the next generation.