Creative Difference

AI can generate songs that sound plausible. Can it generate songs that people genuinely care about? François Pachet has spent decades studying artificial intelligence, music, improvisation, style, and creativity. In this episode, we discuss what Spotify skip data reveals about attention, why surprise must be resolved over time, how Jobim and McCartney create musical interest, and why production ma...

Can AI become a real data scientist? In this episode of Creative Difference, Maxime Gabella speaks with Gaël Varoquaux , co-founder of scikit-learn and Probabl, about the future of AI, statistical learning, and scientific judgment. They discuss the difference between generative AI and statistical machine learning, why current AI systems can write code but still struggle with rigorous data analysis...

This episode is in French. Claire Voisin is one of the world’s leading mathematicians, known for her work in algebraic geometry, Hodge theory, and complex geometry. In this conversation, we explore mathematical creativity: how mathematicians invent definitions, formulate conjectures, search for counterexamples, and learn to think with abstract objects. Claire Voisin discusses the difficulty of res...

Modern AI can perform astonishing tasks, but does making a system work mean that we understand intelligence? In this episode of Creative Difference, Maxime Gabella speaks with Aude Billard , professor of robotics at EPFL, about robot learning and the scientific mystery of how humans acquire physical skills so efficiently. Starting from their shared background in physics, they explore why apparentl...

What is creativity? In this episode of Creative Difference, Maxime Gabella speaks with Alex Carter, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Cambridge, about creativity as “serious play.” Drawing on philosophy, education, literature, humor, and childhood development, they explore why creativity resists definition, how constraints can stimulate originalit...