Lorenzo Zucca, Professor of Law & Philosophy, and Professor Luca Viganò, Professor of Computer Science decided to explore: how does creativity function in the human and synthetic minds? This project became one of the first three projects supported by the KIHSM Development Awards.
They proposed a study of memes, internet content combining images and text. Memes are unique because they represent creativity, which is the ability to generate novel and valuable ideas using the power of imagination. Using imagination, we can form a mental image of something that aren’t present to our senses or something we’ve not fully perceived before. Human sometime use imagination to deal with uncertainty, a situation where there is imperfect or unknown information.
As memes are products of rapidly evolving internet culture, they are useful for studying sense of humour and comedy which rely on human spontaneous creativity. While memes are created by human, their distributions are curated by algorithm tailored to user preferences, making them an interesting product of human/machine interaction.
The project will systematically analyse memes that have been gathered in the Kaggle meme dataset, originally created to train machine learning models in computer vision (image recognition) and natural language processing (text analysis). They hope to produce metrics of creativity through a philosophical, neurological and computational lenses.
These metrics will provide models for “AI creativity”, where scientists will train AI to better understand creativity as human understand them. Scientists will also gain insights into potential and limitation of AI creativity,
The project will also examine the virality of memes to study the role of algorithm in recognising and distributing creative content. This will inform the understanding of the misuse of creative expression and how creativity can be used for propaganda communications.
The idea of this project was created in October 2025 during a King’s Institute for Human and Synthetic Minds (KIHSM) sandpit event. Scientists from different disciplines across the university got together to discuss their curiosities about the human minds and how synthetic models from disciplines can be used to answer questions.