This is the basis of "artificial creativity". Train these NNs to recognize faces (or anything else, maybe especially everything else), and then run random noise through them. See what they come up with. You could have an algorithm coming up with some pretty decent (and original) cartoon faces. Or with art, abstract or not. This is what your brain does.
That doesn't sound right. You suggest if you give the computer something that looks like a face, then add a filter, it has somehow created an idea on its own. Yet you are still telling the computer what to do, it has done nothing creative on its own. I'd venture that real "creativity" is the reverse ... the ability to create something that is recognizable as a face.
Let it find its own face. Let it find several, and let it score the ones it thinks are the best.
Then maybe toss those at another NN that's been trained on cartoon faces. Let it modify this noise-face so that it's more cartoonish.
And just keep iterating through it like that.
> it has somehow created an idea on its own.
Can we please grow up. Creative people aren't "creating" like some judeo-christian deity ex nihilo.
They're exploring a finite ideaspace and keeping the best ideas they stumble upon.