Google thinks maths proves its AI is genuinely creative… but is it?

A close-up fisheye image shows a dog wearing a brown cowboy hat in a grassy park, its wet black nose front and center in a distorted, spherical view.

Here's a claim that'll get creatives talking: Google says it's proved, mathematically, that AI image generators actually invent new images, rather than just copying the photos and artwork they were trained on. It's a big claim, and one that goes right to the heart of the argument many artists have been having with the tech industry for the past few years.

The paper in question, snappily titled On the interpolation effect of score smoothing in diffusion models, was written by Google research scientist Zhengdao Chen and presented at ICLR 2026, a major AI research conference. It's dense, technical stuff, but the headline idea is simple enough to unpack.