The AI Picbreeder Experiment: Can AI agents be creative when nobody tells them what to create?

（＊日本語は英文の後に） In our new GECCO 2026 paper, “In Search of the Ingredients of Open-Endedness: Replicating Picbreeder with Large Vision-Language Models”, in collaboration with MIT and NYU, we revisit Picbreeder, a lost website where people collaboratively evolved images without any predefined objective. Users simply selected images they found interesting, allowing unexpected forms such as faces, animals, vehicles, and skulls to emerge gradually across many generations and many different people. We recreated this process using vision-language model agents.