TY  - Type of reference 
TI  - Can an AI System Be Creative? A Critical Perspective from Art and Engineering 
AU  - Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau 
AB  - This paper examines the question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) systems can be creative, approached from the dual perspective of a researcher trained in electrical engineering, pattern recognition, machine learning, and neural networks, who has also spent most of his life engaged in the arts as actor, stage and film director, writer, composer, and visual artist, and in philosophy. Drawing on Margaret Boden’s foundational framework — both her three properties of creativity (novelty, surprise, and value) and her three types of creative processes (combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational) — the paper argues that AI systems are structurally incapable of creativity in its strongest sense. While they exhibit genuine capability in the domain of combinatorial creativity, they are significantly bounded in exploratory creativity, and fundamentally incapable of transformational creativity. The paper further argues that the most important limitation of current AI systems is not the absence of novelty per se, but the absence of any mechanism for serendipity, accident, or the unexpected — all of which play a central role in the phenomenology of creativity — and the absence of any subject position from which to recognize and welcome such chance events. The paper concludes by proposing a model of human-AI creative collaboration that is both realistic and generative, illustrated by several concrete experiments. The paper is itself a demonstration of the thesis it advances: it was composed through a deliberate human-AI collaborative process, which is described in the methodological note that opens it. 
DO  - 10.21494/ISTE.OP.2026.1473 
JF  - Art and Science 
KW  - artificial intelligence, creativity, computational creativity, Margaret Boden, combinatorial creativity, exploratory creativity, transformational creativity, human-AI collaboration, phenomenology of creativity, chance, accident, generative AI, intelligence artificielle, créativité, créativité computationnelle, Margaret Boden, créativité combinatoire, créativité exploratoire, créativité transformationnelle, collaboration entre l’humain et l’IA, phénoménologie de la créativité, hasard, accident, IA générative,  
L1  - https://www.openscience.fr/IMG/pdf/iste_artsci26v10n2_3.pdf 
LA  - en 
PB  - ISTE OpenScience 
DA  - 2026/07/1 
SN  - 2515-8767 
TT  - Un système d’IA peut-il faire preuve de créativité ? Une perspective critique issue de l’art et de l’ingénierie 
UR  - https://www.openscience.fr/Can-an-AI-System-Be-Creative-A-Critical-Perspective-from-Art-and-Engineering 
IS  - Issue 2 
VL  - 10 
ER  -