Christian Guckelsberger

I'm a Computer Scientist, Art Historian and Assistant Professor in Creative Technologies at Aalto University, where I lead the Autotelic Interaction Research (AIR) group. My goal is to engineer artificial systems that are creative in their own right and in interaction with people. Moreover, I am interested in how creative AI is perceived by its users and the general public, and how we can support its sustainable adoption in the workplace and in society. I conduct interdisciplinary, theoretical work as well as applied qualitative and quantitative research in various creative domains such as videogames, fine art and design, bridging between AI, HCI, Psychology, Philosophy & Creative Practice.

Inspired by its central role in human and animal creativity, I advocate intrinsic motivation as a key to unleashing creativity in artificial systems. I contribute to the comparison of existing and the development of new, psychologically plausible models of computational intrinsic motivation with a focus on multi-agent interaction, and I apply my findings to shape the next generation of transformative videogame AI. I promote games as a domain for computational creativity research because they allow us to study and foster both, human and AI creativity, in play and in game design, across different types of content, with societal, cultural and economic impact.

The list below is a selection of recent publications. You can find the complete list on Google Scholar and my academic CV here. Also, here's a recorded talk with an overview of six recent research projects on creative AI.

You can contact me via email, @CreativeEndvs on Bluesky, Mastodon and X.

I'm always interested in meeting curious, smart and ambitious people to work with. If you would like to do a Research Visit/Postdoc/PhD or your MSc thesis with me, please check out the application instructions on our group's website. Unfortunately, I do not have time to respond to requests that do not follow these instructions.