Hassan Abu Alhaija

Alejandro H. Artiles, Hiromu Yakura, Levin Brinkmann et al.

In open-ended domains like art, autonomous agents must generate ideas that are both original and internally coherent, yet current Large Language Models (LLMs) either default to familiar cultural patterns or sacrifice coherence when pushed toward novelty. We address this by introducing the Cultural Alien Sampler (CAS), a concept-selection method that explicitly separates compositional fit from cultural typicality. CAS uses two GPT-2 models fine-tuned on WikiArt concepts: a Concept Coherence Model that scores whether concepts plausibly co-occur within artworks, and a Cultural Context Model that estimates how typical those combinations are within individual artists' bodies of work. CAS targets combinations that are high in coherence and low in typicality, yielding ideas that maintain internal consistency while deviating from learned conventions and embedded cultural context. In a human evaluation (N = 100), our approach outperforms random selection and GPT-4o baselines and achieves performance comparable to human art students in both perceived originality and harmony. Additionally, a quantitative study shows that our method produces more diverse outputs and explores a broader conceptual space than its GPT-4o counterpart, demonstrating that artificial cultural alienness can unlock creative potential in autonomous agents.

Alejandro Hernandez, Levin Brinkmann, Ignacio Serna et al.

While AI models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in constrained domains like game strategy, their potential for genuine creativity in open-ended domains like art remains debated. We explore this question by examining how AI can transcend human cognitive limitations in visual art creation. Our research hypothesizes that visual art contains a vast unexplored space of conceptual combinations, constrained not by inherent incompatibility, but by cognitive limitations imposed by artists' cultural, temporal, geographical and social contexts. To test this hypothesis, we present the Alien Recombination method, a novel approach utilizing fine-tuned large language models to identify and generate concept combinations that lie beyond human cognitive availability. The system models and deliberately counteracts human availability bias, the tendency to rely on immediately accessible examples, to discover novel artistic combinations. This system not only produces combinations that have never been attempted before within our dataset but also identifies and generates combinations that are cognitively unavailable to all artists in the domain. Furthermore, we translate these combinations into visual representations, enabling the exploration of subjective perceptions of novelty. Our findings suggest that cognitive unavailability is a promising metric for optimizing artistic novelty, outperforming merely temperature scaling without additional evaluation criteria. This approach uses generative models to connect previously unconnected ideas, providing new insight into the potential of framing AI-driven creativity as a combinatorial problem.