In March 2016, the world watched a move that nobody expected.
It happened on a Go board.
The match was between Lee Sedol, one of the greatest Go players in history, and AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence developed by DeepMind. Go is a 2,500-year-old strategy game in which two players place stones on a grid to surround territory. The rules are simple, but the number of possible moves is almost unimaginably large.
Halfway through game two, AlphaGo played Move 37.
The commentators paused. Professional players assumed it must be a mistake. The move landed on the fifth line of the board, an unusual place that almost no top player would choose. Some estimated the odds of a human expert making that move at about 1 in 10,000.
For a moment, the room went quiet. Then people began to realise what they were looking at.
Move 37 was not a mistake. It was brilliant.
The move reshaped the board and created a strategic position that most players had never considered. It was a move that could be considered creative. Unexpected. Novel. Original. Effective.
AlphaGo was calculating faster than humans and exploring possibilities humans had not. But the story doesn’t end there.
In game four, Lee Sedol produced Move 78. This move confused AlphaGo. It broke the system’s expectations and forced it into unfamiliar territory. For the first time in the match, AlphaGo struggled to respond.
Lee Sedol went on to win the game. Move 78 became a symbol of human brilliance. An intriguing question sits between these two moments. Would Move 78 have happened without Move 37?
Something changed after AlphaGo’s surprising move. It widened the map.
Move 37 showed that the game’s boundaries were even larger than many players believed. It revealed that unconventional thinking and moves might not only work but also be effective.
AlphaGo introduced a new possibility.
The human responded with one of its own.
The game evolved.
Creativity does not shrink. It expands.
There is a common perspective about AI and creativity.
It’s said that AI can’t really create. The AlphaGo story challenges that perspective.
Move 37 did not come from a human playbook. AlphaGo had trained by playing millions of games against itself, searching through possibilities that humans had rarely explored.
More interesting still is what happened next.
Humans learned from it.
Professional Go players around the world began studying AlphaGo’s strategies. Moves that once looked strange began appearing in modern games.
AlphaGo had not replaced human creativity.
It had expanded it.
What this means for communications professionals
Many people working in comms feel the tension around AI…
There is excitement about what the technology can do.
But there are also concerns about originality, authenticity and the future of creative work.
It’s good to hold both of these thoughts. But the AlphaGo story offers a useful perspective.
AI does not have to replace creativity – it can expand it.
In our own work, we have started to see this happen.
In December, our team won the comms2point0 UnAward for Best Human AI Collaboration. The project reached further and deeper because AI was part of the team.
Not as a task optimiser, but more as a thinking partner.
It helped us surface patterns, connect ideas across different sources, and explore perspectives faster.
The ideas still came from the Alive team: we continued to use our experience and real-world understanding and the judgment was still human. But the potential and possibilities were larger.
That is where AI becomes interesting for comms pros and the work we do.
Used well, it can help us explore alternative framings for a story, test a narrative from different perspectives, connect research and insight more quickly, and challenge our assumptions before we move forward.
In other words, it helps us see more of the board and the game.
And that does not diminish creativity. It strengthens it.
The genie is out of the bottle
AI has been around for some time. For years, it operated quietly beneath the surface like a submarine.
Now it has surfaced. We can all see and experience it.
There are legitimate concerns about how AI is developed and used. Questions about ethics, jobs, energy consumption and intellectual property deserve serious attention.
But the technology is not going away, so we must drive how we work with it.
Do we see it as a threat to creativity? Or something that expands possibilities?
Back to the Go board
When AlphaGo played Move 37, people thought it was wrong. Then they realised it was brilliant.
When Lee Sedol played Move 78, he reminded the world what human ingenuity looks like.
Together, those two moves tell a powerful story.
A machine explored a possibility humans had not.
A human responded with one of his own.
And the game evolved.
Maybe that is the most useful way to think about AI and creativity.
Not as a replacement, but as an expansion of the board.
