I do think it is a personification, but I think people find it valuable as an analogy. I don’t think the creativity is in terms of the activity of the species specifically (as in it self-determining) but that the system allows for “exploration” within a set of guidelines.
My area of science is in chemical reaction dynamics. We often use language like “exploring the landscape” to talk about stochastic motion of molecules governed by a potential energy surface. We can have random motion that results in 99% of molecules ending up as one product and not another.
Chemists can look at a molecule and try to “engineer” a route to synthesize that particular molecule. Then when they look at how “nature” does it, it looks different … more creative somehow.
So even though the molecules are governed by random motion, and are certainly not self-aware, as we observe them bump into each other and in unexpected ways become new molecules, sometimes it just seems creative. The biologists see this on a much larger scale, I believe.