AI systems can produce individually novel outputs, but novelty alone is not creativity. The researchers here argue that genuine creativity requires respect for constraints and that current AI systems lack this capacity.
Constraints operate at three levels: physical (baked into matter), concrete (instantiated in a fixed substrate), and modelled (represented so they can be manipulated, transferred, and counterfactually varied). Understanding—the cognitive form of this third level—is the capacity to navigate between constrained perspectives and integrate across them. LLMs are convincingly coherent within any single frame, but they possess no trajectory of their own; their aggregated voice resolves into a coherent perspective only when a human supplies the grounding. The most promising path is human-AI co-creativity, but we leave the door open for any system—biological or artificial—whose learned, factored, path-dependent representations let it extend its own phylogeny.
