# Explaining Creative Artifacts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.07126 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07126/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [On scientific understanding with artificial intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01467/) (2022)
- [Measuring Combinatorial Creativity in Large Language Models and Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21043/) (2025)
- [GODBench: A Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models in Video Comment Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11436/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human creativity is often described as the mental process of combining associative elements into a new form, but emerging computational creativity algorithms may not operate in this manner. Here we develop an inverse problem formulation to deconstruct the products of combinatorial and compositional creativity into associative chains as a form of post-hoc interpretation that matches the human creative process. In particular, our formulation is structured as solving a traveling salesman problem through a knowledge graph of associative elements. We demonstrate our approach using an example in explaining culinary computational creativity where there is an explicit semantic structure, and two examples in language generation where we either extract explicit concepts that map to a knowledge graph or we consider distances in a word embedding space. We close by casting the length of an optimal traveling salesman path as a measure of novelty in creativity.