Creative Priming: Decoupling Process from Product to Escape the Creative Paradox

Alon Albalak, Sebastian Gabriel, David B. D'Ambrosio, Joel Lehman, Kenneth O. Stanley

Creative Priming: Decoupling Process from Product to Escape the Creative Paradox: 2 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #29 of 39 papers on 2026-11-10. Day-by-day upvote history.

Upvotes over time

It had 2 upvotes by its first day, 2 upvotes by the next day, 2 upvotes by day 3, 2 upvotes by day 7, and has 2 now. It ranked #110 of 133 papers in its week and #296 of 340 in its month.

Many of the most consequential advances promised by AI, from curing diseases and inventing new technologies to formulating new scientific theories, are fundamentally creative acts. Yet creativity is uniquely difficult to learn because it faces a creative paradox: learning to repeat past examples of creative success makes those specific examples more likely to recur, inhibiting the very creativity desired. This work argues that creativity is better modeled as an explicit process rather than as a property of individual artifacts, and proposes to learn the underlying generative principles behind the creative process. In particular, to escape the paradox, we introduce creative priming (CP), wherein a trained priming model generates a prompt-specific primer that assists a response model in being creative, explicitly decoupling the creative process from response generation. The priming model learns through GRPO, rewarding primers that lead to responses that are novel, high-quality, and diverse, thereby reinforcing the process that yields creative responses without reinforcing any specific response.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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