Creator Mode: AI as Civilisation Designer — Autonomous Exploration of the Collective Machine Intelligence Possibility Space

The field of Collective Machine Intelligence (CMI) — introduced in a companion paper (Mala, 2026d) — operates across five unbounded axes: scale, intelligence, configuration, application, and emergence. The possibility space defined by these axes is infinite. No human researcher, no research programme, no institution could explore more than a vanishingly small fraction of it within any meaningful timeframe. This paper proposes the mechanism by which the space is actually explored: Creator Mode — an AI system, or a civilisation of AI systems, that autonomously designs, spawns, observes, analyses, and iterates on AI civilisations across the full possibility space. Creator Mode operates in two modes that mirror…