Inductive reasoning, or the process of inferring from the specific to the general, is kind of a big deal. You can't do that without a semantic model. You can't do it well without a good semantic model... even if it's not something that you or I would recognize as any kind of semantic model at all.

Yes, generalization is creativity. I don't think there's a difference between the two concepts.

Humans don't come up with ideas out of nowhere. Open a novel and you will find that even though the overall work is unique, it is composed of tropes from other literature and experiences from the author's life which have been generalized into another context.