Seminar: Creative machines & human wellbeing: Is creativity a necessary part of the good life?
- Date: Mar 4, 2025
- Time: 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Matthew J. Dennis
- Location: Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin
- Room: 316
- Host: Center for Humans and Machines
- Topic: Discussion and debate formats, lectures

Creativity is required for many activities that humans prize, including play, humour, imagination, artistic production, and innovation. The recent use of artificial intelligence (ChatGPT, DALL-E, Gemini) to create artworks, write poetry, and innovate has motivated philosophers to reconsider the ethical challenges of using creative machines. Challenges include the value of originality, the unfairness of plagiarism, the danger of deskilling, and the significance of human embodiment.
Nevertheless, there is another reason why outsourcing creativity to machines is a concern for ethicists: various evidence suggests that being creative and living well are correlated. Anecdotally speaking, many creative activities (dancing, singing, life drawing, pottery classes) are taken up for self-care and/or to enhance well-being. There is also empirical support that creativity and well-being are linked, such as a recent meta-analysis that found a strong correlation between well-being and what the authors call ‘everyday creativity’ (Acar et al. 2020). How can we explain this? This talk will explore how philosophical insights into creativity and well-being can illuminate the empirical connection between these two concepts.
Matthew J. Dennis is an Assistant Professor in Ethics of Technology at TU Eindhoven. His research focuses on how emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, challenge our notions of creativity, autonomy, and well-being. He also works on how intercultural perspectives on human flourishing can guide the design of emerging technologies. He was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at TU Delft (2019–21) and an Early Career Innovation Fellow at the University of Warwick (2019). He currently co-directs the Eindhoven Center for Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence and is a Senior Fellow of the Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies research consortium. He received his Joint Monash-Warwick PhD in 2019.
Alternatively, join online:
Meeting number: 2743 579 4261
Password: 2743 579 4261