CONCEPT
AI as Combinational Engine
The structural characterization of large language models as machines whose primary creative contribution is combinational — surfacing connections across training-corpus range that no individual mind could make because no individual has read everything.
When Boden's taxonomy is applied to contemporary AI systems, a specific pattern emerges. Large language models excel at exploratory creativity within formally definable spaces (chess, code, mathematical proof), perform combinational creativity at extraordinary range (connecting concepts across their training corpus), and have not demonstrated transformational creativity in any convincing form. Of these, the combinational capacity is the one that most directly enables the human-AI creative partnership Edo Segal describes in You On AI. The machine surfaces connections; the human evaluates which connections matter. The quality of the partnership depends on both — the machine's range supplying candidate combinations the human could not generate alone, the human's judgment selecting which are genuinely illuminating from the many that are merely plausible.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The combinational engine framing cuts through much of the confused AI-creativity discourse. It does not claim machines are conscious or that they understand their outputs; it does not deny that they produce genuinely novel connections. It