Are Deep Neural Networks Creative?

Are deep neural networks creative? It seems like a reasonable question. Google's "Inceptionism" technique transforms images, iteratively modifying them to enhance the activation of specific neurons in a deep net. The images appear trippy, transforming rocks into buildings or leaves into insects. Another neural generative model, introduced by Leon Gatys of the University of Tubingen in Germany, can extract the style from one image (say a painting by Van Gogh), and apply it to the content of another image (say a photograph). Generative adversarial networks (GANs), introduced by Ian Goodfellow, are capable of synthesizing novel images by modeling the distribution of seen images.