It was Napoleon Hill who divided imagination into two types:

  1. Synthetic Imagination
  2. Creative Imagination

Synthetic imagination: this is the ability to combine existing ideas into new combinations. Nothing completely "new" is created from nothing - instead, the mind reorganises known concepts.

I'll give you some examples:

  • A businessman combining ideas from Uber + Airbnb
  • A photographer mixing two existing lighting techniques
  • A teacher simplifying AI concepts using everyday analogies
  • A musician blending jazz with electronic music

Einstein's idea of "combinatory play" was actually very close to this - he believed creativity often comes from connecting unrelated concepts together.

Creative imagination: refers to genuinely original insight - intuition, sudden inspiration, breakthrough ideas, visions, "aha" moments. Or, as I call it - God's intervention. Napoleon Hill described it almost mystically, as if ideas arrive from beyond ordinary reasoning. Modern psychology would frame it more as subconscious processing and non-linear insight.

Here are some examples of creative imagination:

  • Newton suddenly grasping gravity
  • Einstein visualising riding alongside a beam of light
  • A composer "hearing" music internally before writing it
  • An inventor suddenly seeing the solution after struggling for weeks

Hill described the distinction like this:

Synthetic imagination: "arrange old concepts into new combinations."

Creative imagination: "the faculty through which hunches and inspirations are received."

Einstein himself did not formally divide creativity into these two categories, but his thinking strongly overlaps with the first type. He repeatedly spoke about imagination, visual thinking, and "combinatory play." One of Einstein's most famous remarks was:

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

Modern cognitive science actually supports a similar division:

  • Generative creativity: producing ideas, associations, possibilities
  • Evaluative creativity: testing, refining, structuring those ideas

Researchers today often describe creativity as a movement between spontaneous intuitive thinking and analytical synthesis. What is interesting is that highly creative people usually use both systems: synthetic creativity (combining known things intelligently) and creative imagination (receiving unexpected insight).

For example:

Steve Jobs was largely a synthetic creator - he recombined existing technologies into elegant products.

Nikola Tesla leaned heavily toward visionary imagination - mentally visualising inventions before building them.

Albert Einstein used both: deep mathematical synthesis plus intuitive visual imagination.

How does it relate to current AI systems?

They are extraordinarily powerful examples of synthetic creativity: recombining, restructuring, translating, pattern-matching, extrapolating, remixing.

That is exactly what large language models fundamentally do. They predict highly probable continuations from immense amounts of human-created material. This allows AI to:

  • write books
  • generate code
  • compose music
  • design images
  • simulate reasoning
  • imitate styles
  • combine domains

But does not enable it to have:

  • intuition
  • desire
  • subjective awareness
  • emotion
  • existential tension
  • personal suffering
  • mortality
  • symbolic meaning
  • internal intention

AI tools - all of them - lack, and will always lack, Creative Imagination.

Now, would you answer the question:

"Is AI really Artificial Intelligence or… is it AC - Artificial Cleverness?"

There will always be one thing most appreciated and needed: human relationships between people. There will always be a need for God's "intervention". There will always be something that no Cleverness created by an LLM can ever surpass.

In my opinion.