AI Systems Can Be Creative Too, and It Matters for Drug Discovery
A new analysis of Google's hypothesis-generating AI system reveals it already exhibits creative traits, challenging the assumption that automation is purely mechanical. The finding suggests that treating AI science tools as creative partners—not just calculators—could unlock better approaches to validating and improving them, with implications for biomedical research and drug development.
Originaltitel: From Science to the Arts and Back: Computational Creativity Perspectives on the Automation of Science
Science demands both intelligence and creativity, yet research on automating science rarely considers the latter. We take a creativity perspective and present a case study on Google’s AI Co-scientist, a system that helps researchers generate novel hypotheses in biomedical domains. We analyse the AI Co-scientist using concepts from Computational Creativity, organised around four perspectives: product, process, producer, and press. Our analysis shows that the AI Co-scientist already demonstrates several creative traits, even if not framed that way by its authors. An analysis of the arts through the same four perspectives highlights that not only the creation but also the communication in the arts depends on subjective and emotional understanding, making them harder to automate. We conclude that Computational Creativity can provide useful models, theories, and evaluation methods for advancing automated science.