I feel like AlphaGo is a counter-example - it learned by playing against itself. That said, go is an extremely constrained problem space. It's possible that in

I feel like AlphaGo is a counter-example - it learned by playing against itself. That said, go is an extremely constrained problem space. It's possible that in science, mathematics, games etc that AI could keep advancing without human input or feedback (and not hit a plateau where more human input is needed) because the universe or whatever axioms you choose provide all the necessary structure you need to keep making "progress". But for cultural artefacts - music / art / literature etc perhaps not. At least in the near term while we provide data, power and compute perhaps the most important thing humans do is set goals and rewards.