What is intelligence?
Is it simply an ability to collate existing information?
Where does creativity come into it?

The “Minds”, God-like Artificial Intelligences central
to the Culture novels, contain, from the moment of
their creation, all the knowledge the Culture has at
that point. This isn’t just plain statistics; most Minds
would at some point in their existence contain lifetime’s
worth of thoughts and memories of billons of people.

Minds all have the potential to be creative, but if you
have access to trillions of thoughts and ideas and the
ability to connect them at superluminal speeds, then any
creativity is simply a vast composite of billions of small
personal acts of creativity.

Few, if any, actual ideas may come from a Mind itself.

The Drones produced by the Culture and similar civilizations
(such as the humans inhabiting the ex-Culture orbital Vaavatch)
are highly intelligent, but their humour seems as a rule to be
limited to a brand of acidic sarcasm, which also implies a
lack of imagination. For example “Use of Weapons” is
about the exploits of an “alien” mercenary for Special
Circumstances (the secret ops/ dirty tricks branch of Contact).
The character has an obviously unsavoury background, partly
due to an attempt on his life by an apparent former lover
when reintroduced, but this was never guessed at by his
recruiters because he was recruited on a different planet
to his home world. His back story was simply believed and
his reasons for choosing in effect an exile from his world
were never questioned or ever seen as being suspicious.

Of course, Special Circumstances would have had obvious
reasons for turning a blind eye but it perhaps shows the
blind faith the humans in the Culture have in their AIs.

A Mind Einstein is difficult to imagine, for example, as any
collation of nine thousand years of physics and mathematics
that would produce a new insight into the universe would be
achieved by all Minds with this knowledge. Geniuses such as
Einstein or da Vinci (or any one of the Culture’s own Referers)
achieve their work through creativity as well as intelligence
and provide an individual perspective on the universe.
As a note, it would be difficult to see what creative labour
Drones could participate in that couldn’t be done by a human
even better.