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Humans in the Black Box: A New Paradigm for Evaluating the Design of Creative Systems

Modular creative systems employ specialized modules that take on challenging responsibilities. Such modules can be expensive to develop and are often imperfect, leading to uncertainty in whether a system’s poor results are due to module imperfection or larger systemic issues. Computational creativity research would benefit from a method for validating the design of creative systems before expending development resources implementing them. We present ideal-module prototyping (IMP), a design validation paradigm that serves these needs by using modules that delegate responsibilities to humans as an ideal against which to compare system expectations and performance. We relate an experiment we conducted in applying IMP to an existing creative system to demonstrate the insights that can be gained from this method. We argue for the widespread adoption of modular creative system design validated by ideal-module prototyping.