1. That two distant topics or ideas are actually much more closely related. The creative sees one example of an idea and applies it to a discipline that nobody expects. In theory, reduction of the maximally distant can probably be measured with a tangible metric.
2. Discovery of ideas that are even more maximally distant. Pushing the edge, and this can be done by pure search and randomness actually. But it's no good if it's garbage. The trick is, what is garbage? That is very context dependent.
(Also, a creative might be measured on the efficiency of these metrics rather than absolute output)
Seriously though, I'd like to hear suggestions on how to automatically evaluate an AI model's creativity, no humans in the loop.