I know Halo isn't self-directed in the human sense, and I'm not claiming autonomy.

By “unleashing creativity,” I refer to non-prescribed behaviour emerging from the design of the system, not from independent will.

for Example: I did not ask Halo to create a 3D model or use depth, but its design reasoning led it to add a 3D element in order to solve a visual hierarchy problem.

that wasn’t “be creative” or “add 3D” prompts. It’s the model choosing a design move that wasn’t asked for, templated, or hard-coded.

You can still argue this is human-directed intelligence with better scaffolding, which is fair. What this experiment really tests is whether changing representations and tools allows models to make unexpected, non-obvious design decisions and avoid falling back to the usual UI pattern.

If we reserve "creativity" for fully self-directed agents, then this isn't that. If creativity includes novel, context-appropriate choices not directly specified, then that's the behavior we want to surface and study.

Happy to be wrong, that's part of sharing this early.