The Generative Creative System

Every creative act takes place within a generative system: a structured set of rules that defines what is possible within a domain, what combinations are permitted, what moves count as moves at all. The rules of tonal harmony are a generative system. The syntax of a programming language is a generative system. The conventions of the novel are a generative system. Boden’s framework makes the generative system the central analytical object, because the critical question about any creative act—and about any computational creativity program—is the relationship between the creator and its generative system: does the creator search within the system, combine across systems, or modify the system itself? The entire history of computational creativity programs, from Harold Cohen’s AARON to large language models, can be read as a history of expanding generative systems: from the explicitly coded rules of early programs to the implicit statistical regularities of transformer-scale models. What has not changed across this history is the structural relationship