Want to Understand Creativity? Enlist an AI Collaborator

Not for the student, but for the teacher, who plays a short piano melody. Without missing a measure, the student follows with an improvised, yet derivative, cello run. The student plays the same run again, and then again. "I have it looping, actually, so you can hear the response over and over again," says the teacher, Jesse Engel, a computer scientist with Google Brain. "And you can hear some similarities with what I played, but it's not doing the job of trying to replicate what I played. It's trying to continue it in a meaningful way."