In Search of the Ingredients of Open-Endedness: Replicating Picbreeder with Large Vision-Language Models
We are in the midst of large-scale industrial and academic efforts to automate the processes of scientific, technological and creative production through AI-driven assistants. Historically, a fundamental property of these processes in their human form has been their open-endedness: their capacity for generating a seemingly endless supply of novel and meaningful new forms. Do artificial agents have any capacity for such fruitful unguided discovery? To answer this question, we turn to Picbreeder, the canonical exemplar of human-driven open-ended search, in which users collaboratively generated a diverse library of images through interactive evolution of small neural networks. We replicate P...
| Authors | Sam Earle, Kai Arulkumaran, Andrew Dai et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 1 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 May 2026 |
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