In 2015, researchers Antoine Cully, Jeff Clune, Danesh Tarapore, and Jean-Baptiste Mouret looked at an outlandish anomaly on their screen.

They were training robots in a simulated environment to adapt to walking if their legs had been damaged. When they tried to find the least contact with the ground needed for the robot to walk, they had found an impossible value — the computer had calculated that the robot could walk with 0% contact of the feet with the ground.

How could a robot possibly walk without making contact with the ground?

When they ran the video, they found something amazing. The computer had come up with a gait in which the robot could invert itself and walk using its elbow joints, thus reducing the contact of the feet to 0.

The AI came up with a creative solution to walk without any of its feet

If this task was given to a human, it seems highly unlikely that they would consider a robot walking gait that didn’t use legs. The AI came up with a unique solution by itself.

So the question then arises — Was the AI creative?

Creativity is a skill we usually consider uniquely human. For all of history, we have been the most creative beings on planet Earth. Birds can make their nests, ants can make their hills, but no other species on the 510.1 million km² surface of the Earth comes close to the level of creativity we humans display.

However, just in the last decade we have acquired the ability to do amazing things with computers, just like the robot. With the AI boom of the 2010s, computers can now recognise faces, translate between every language, take calls for you, and beat players at the world’s most complicated board game, to name a few.

All of a sudden, we must face the possibility that our ability to be creative is not unrivalled in the universe.