Marcus du Sautoy

Marcus du Sautoy is the rarest kind of thinker in the AI debate: a working creator who insists on precision. As Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford and a research mathematician whose career spans the mysteries of prime numbers and the architecture of symmetry, he arrived at artificial intelligence not as a humanist defending the arts but as a logician who needed to know whether the word creativity meant anything at all. His answer begins with the Lovelace test—a criterion demanding that a machine produce something new, surprising, and valuable in a way that cannot be reduced to the intentions of its makers. He then borrows Boden’s three-part taxonomy of creativity to deliver a verdict that satisfies neither the alarmists nor the cheerleaders: the machines have decisively entered exploratory creativity and are advancing on the combinational kind, but transformational creativity—the changing of the rules rather than the playing of the game—remains undemonstrated. From Gödel’s incompleteness theorems to the pivot of a single move on a Go board, du