PERSON
Margaret Boden
The cognitive scientist who gave AI creativity its only rigorous taxonomy—identifying three modes of creative novelty that dissolve the question “Can machines be creative?” into the questions that actually matter.
Margaret Boden spent half a century doing the work that most AI discourse merely gestures at: actually defining what creativity is before debating whether machines possess it. Her taxonomy—three modes she called
exploratory,
combinational, and
transformational—is not a parlor classification but a diagnostic instrument: it tells you which cognitive operations a creative act requires, and therefore which operations a machine would need to replicate. Her central framework rests on the notion of a
conceptual space—the structured domain of possibilities within which any creative act takes place. Exploratory creativity searches that space; combinational creativity bridges between spaces; transformational creativity changes the space itself. The distinction between these three types is not a matter of degree but of kind, and the kind matters enormously because current AI excels powerfully at the first two while struggling to demonstrate the third. Her further distinction between
P-creativity and H-creativity—novelty that is new to an individual versus novelty that is new to human history—is what makes the