Sakana AI· Sakana modelsResearch paper

The AI Picbreeder Experiment: Can AI agents be creative when nobody tells them what to create?

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.

From the source

In our new GECCO 2026 paper, “In Search of the Ingredients of Open-Endedness: Replicating Picbreeder with Large Vision-Language Models”, in collaboration with MIT and NYU, we revisit Picbreeder, a lost website where people collaboratively evolved images without any predefined objective.

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09 Jul 2026 15:00 UTC

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