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.
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.
If he wants to make a career out of something so simple, I'm not going to stop him. Why anyone would listen to him, that's another thing entirely. Perhaps you like the sound of bullshit.
Random input filtered by face detection does create new faces. It's just a different method of creating faces than one that derives a face from the parameters of the face filter (which is more like how a human would do it), but either way, you get new output that is identifiable and identified as a face.
Yes, the computer is biased by your input of the face detection filter, but how is that any different than a human's cultural biases? The only real differences are purely internal details.
For me, creativity often happens by getting a random idea and recognizing it as part of a whole which is yet to be created. In the linked case it could be something like identifying a face in the clouds and then extrapolating that to create an image of a whole cloud person.
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.