The AI Picbreeder Experiment: Can AI agents be creative when nobody tells them what to create?
Research paper
Sakana AI, in collaboration with MIT and NYU, published a paper at GECCO 2026 titled 'In Search of the Ingredients of Open-Endedness: Replicating Picbreeder with Large Vision-Language Models'.
The paper replicates the Picbreeder experiment using vision-language model agents to explore open-ended discovery, finding both promise and limitations compared to human creativity.
The paper is nominated for a best paper award.