Not sure what you mean by this, @Jordan. Deism essentially says that God built all necessary processes into nature, thus avoiding any need to be involved after the initial creation. That appears very characteristic of TE ideas such as Howard Van Till’s Robust Formational Economy Pronicple.
ID is not incompatible with that (dependent on the science invoked) but customarily suggests that God but be immanently involved in his world to make things happen - classically theistic rather than deistic. But maybe I’ve miusunderstood you, because I’m not clear what you mean by:
Who is being creative here? And in what sense are they free? In the past, when I’ve probed past the “free creation” rhetoric about puppetmaster gods, etc, then all I get to is “inanimate matter subject to chance turning up good stuff.” That is neither deism nor theism, but Epicureanism. it’s not freedom, or creation, either.