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Transformative Creativity

PublishedJune 15, 2026FiledConceptDomainLLM ArchitectureTagsLLM ArchitectureTheoryCreativityDiscoveryAsiReading4 minSourceAI-synthesised

Boden's three-level model of creativity (combinational, exploratory, transformative) used to locate today's AI achievements — Move 37, AlphaFold, theorem-proving — at the exploratory level within human-given conceptual spaces, and to frame Boden level-3 (creating new conceptual spaces, à la Hassabis's 'could AI rediscover general relativity?' test) as a hallmark requirement of true ASI

Illustration for Transformative Creativity

Sources#

Summary#

Does more intelligence imply more creativity? The "From AGI to ASI" report uses Margaret Boden's framework to give the question structure and to locate where current AI sits. A creative product must be novel, surprising, and valuable (Boden 2004) — and the report argues today's celebrated AI achievements are predominantly exploratory creativity within human-provided conceptual spaces, while transformative creativity (creating entirely new conceptual spaces) may be the hallmark requirement of true ASI.

Boden's three levels#

  1. Combinational — unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas (poetic imagery, analogies, recombining engineering modules).
  2. Exploratory — finding new elements within an existing conceptual space (a new piece in an established musical style; a novel move in a known game).
  3. Transformative — creating entirely new conceptual spaces or ways of thinking (quantum theory, relativity, Cubism, inventing a new kind of game).

Novelty splits into P-creativity (psychological — new to its creator) and H-creativity (historical — new to humanity). Surprise ranges from statistical unlikelihood to "previously seemed impossible." Value is contextual and may only be recognized retrospectively.

Where AI sits today#

  • AlphaGo's Move 37 (2016) — the canonical example: a statistically-unlikely, expert-surprising, effective move. Lee Sedol: "Surely AlphaGo is creative... a really meaningful move." But it is exploratory — a novel move in a known game.
  • AlphaFold (novel protein structures) and automated theorem-proving — also predominantly Boden levels 1–2: profound exploratory creativity within well-defined, human-provided conceptual spaces (see AI-Driven Formal Proof Search).
  • Today's systems augment human ideation in math and physics, boosting the creativity of human–AI collaboratives in subtle ways.

The transformative test for ASI#

Reaching Boden's third level — inventing scientific theories that trigger Kuhnian paradigm shifts — would firmly satisfy the criteria and is offered as a "true test" for ASI. Demis Hassabis's formulation:

"If we went back to the time of Einstein in 1900... could an AI system actually come up with general relativity with the same information Einstein had at the time? And clearly today, the answer is no... there's still something missing."

This is the creativity-framing of the The Abstraction Barrier: transformative creativity is grounded discovery of novel conceptual primitives. The report also distinguishes scientific creativity (value grounded in predictive power / empirical truth) from artistic creativity (value is subjective, set by dynamic social systems of artists/audiences/critics) — transformative artistic creativity would require deep grounded understanding of human culture and its emotional trajectory, not just raw optimization power.

Connections#

  • Why AI Lags at Design — the novelty-premium reason borders the harder claim that new-concept generation is a real ceiling
  • The Abstraction Barrier — Boden level-3 is the creativity-language for exactly what the abstraction barrier says AI may be unable to do: form genuinely novel primitives
  • Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) — transformative creativity is offered as a hallmark requirement / "true test" of ASI
  • Research Taste as the Human Bottleneck — judging which novel directions are valuable is the taste dimension; transformative creativity is taste at the frontier of concept-space
  • Autonomous Scientific Discovery — June 2026 wet-lab AI results are the live test of whether AI is climbing from exploratory toward transformative creativity, or still operating within human-defined spaces
  • AI-Driven Formal Proof Search — new theorem-proving is placed at Boden levels 1–2 (exploratory within Lean's formal space)
  • Jagged Intelligence (Ghosts, Not Animals) — "creativity might be just another capability AI fails at then masters" mirrors the joke/theory-of-mind precedent

Open Questions#

  • Does increasing intelligence inherently produce increasing creativity, or do transformative leaps require something (grounded discovery) the current paradigm lacks?
  • Is the AlphaGo→AlphaFold class strictly exploratory, or are there early signs of transformative (new-conceptual-space) creativity?
  • Could transformative artistic creativity ever emerge from optimization power without lived cultural grounding?

Sources#

  • From AGI to ASI — Section 6 ("Is superintelligence super-creative?"); Boden (2004), Hassabis (2025)
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