Why Creativity Cannot Be Interpolated - MLST

Jeremy Budd, Assistant Professor at the University of Birmingham, and Tim Scarfe, CEO of Machine Learning Street Talk, discuss the paper “Why Creativity Cannot Be Interpolated”, which argues that genuine creativity requires respect for constraints that today’s AI lacks.

Building on ideas from François Chollet, Kenneth Stanley, and others, explore why AI slop is the result of novelty unconstrained by understanding and how systems capable of extending their own phylogeny could become creative, regardless of substrate.

In This Episode -

• Creativity vs. interpolation

• Understanding as structured constraint-following

• Picbreeder’s evolutionary image representations

• AlphaZero and creative game play

• Why LLMs remain highly derivative

• Human-AI co-creativity

• Open-ended search vs. optimization

• Evolvable representations and abstraction

• Constraints enable creativity

• Future directions beyond gradient descent

References -

• CBMM10 Panel: Research on Intelligence in the Age of AI - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg-w_n9NJIE&t=2885

• “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4” - https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712

• Chollet: “On the Measure of Intelligence” - https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547

• Stanley: PicBreeder - https://picbreeder.net/6793

• Sakana’s PicBreeder Experiment - https://pub.sakana.ai/picbreeder-vlm/

• ARC-AGI-3 - https://arcprize.org/arc-agi/3

About the Paper -

“Why Creativity Cannot Be Interpolated: And Why Understanding Is the Path to Get There”

Jeremy Budd and Tim Scarfe

The paper argues that novelty alone is insufficient for creativity. Instead, creative systems must develop structured, path-dependent representations that preserve the constraints underlying previous discoveries, allowing them to extend rather than merely recombine existing ideas. Through examples including Picbreeder, AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and modern large language models, the authors propose that human-AI collaboration currently offers the strongest path toward genuinely creative machine intelligence.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547

About the Guests -

Dr. Jeremy Budd is Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on the intersection of applied analysis and data science, specializing in graph-based learning methods for image processing.

https://jeremybudd.com/

Dr. Tim Scarfe is the founder and host of the popular AI podcast Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST). He’s a multi-time startup founder and was previously a Principal Engineer at Microsoft and Chief Data Scientist at bp. He has a Ph.D in machine learning and a first-class degree in computer science.

https://www.mlst.ai/about

https://www.youtube.com/@MachineLearningStreetTalk

Credits -

• Host & Music: Bryan Landers, Technical Staff, Ndea

• Editor: Alejandro Ramirez

• https://x.com/ndea

• https://x.com/bryanlanders

• https://ndea.com

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