Cultures of Process. Of Lone Geniuses and Emergent Novelty
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In this conference paper, I try to advances a non-agentic, process-oriented account of novelty that complements social-ontological analyses of LLMs while resisting both techno-determinism and romantic individualism. Attributing creativity to the products of an LLM, therefore, is not a verdict on transformer software per se but a reflection of how its outputs are woven into ongoing cultural processes of novelty selection and valuation. Statistical variations generated by the model gain the status of “creative” only when broader cultural processes recognise, circulate, and stabilise them within existing repertoires of interpretation and use. Creativity therefore appears at the interface where algorithmic stochasticity meets socio-cultural selection.