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

- Company: Sakana AI (sakana.ai)
- Announced: 2026-07-09T15:00:00+00:00
- Category: research-paper
- Subject: Sakana models
- Source: https://sakana.ai/picbreeder-ai
- Record: https://forck.live/items/4678-the-ai-picbreeder-experiment-can-ai-agents-be-creative-when-nobody-tells-them

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.

## Evidence

Verbatim from https://sakana.ai/picbreeder-ai:

> 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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Record: https://forck.live/items/4678-the-ai-picbreeder-experiment-can-ai-agents-be-creative-when-nobody-tells-them
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