AI can make you more creative—but it has limits

Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines

Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Since 2017 | Week 357 |  July 12-18, 2024 | Archive

AI can make you more creative—but it has limits

By Rhiannon Williams | MIT Technology Review | July 12, 2024

Extractive Summary of the Article | Read | Listen

Generative AI models have made it simpler and quicker to produce everything from text passages and images to video clips and audio tracks. Texts and media that might have taken years for humans to create can now be generated in seconds.

But while AI’s output can certainly seem creative, do these models actually boost human creativity?  That’s what two researchers set out to explore in new research published in Science Advances, studying how people used OpenAI’s large language model GPT-4 to write short stories.  The model was helpful—but only to an extent. They found that while AI improved the output of less creative writers, it made little difference to the quality of the stories produced by writers who were already creative. The stories in which AI had played a part were also more similar to each other than those dreamed up entirely by humans. 

The research adds to the growing body of work investigating how generative AI affects human creativity, suggesting that although access to AI can offer a creative boost to an individual, it reduces creativity in the aggregate. 

To understand generative AI’s effect on humans’ creativity, we first need to determine how creativity is measured. This study used two metrics: novelty and usefulness. Novelty refers to a story’s originality, while usefulness in this context reflects the possibility that each resulting short story could be developed into a book or other publishable work. 

The findings make sense, given that people who are already creative don’t really need to use AI to be creative, says Tuhin Chakrabarty, a computer science researcher at Columbia University, who specializes in AI and creativity but wasn’t involved in the study. 

There are some potential drawbacks to taking advantage of the model’s help, too. AI-generated stories across the board are similar in terms of semantics and content, Chakrabarty says, and AI-generated writing is full of telltale giveaways, such as very long, exposition-heavy sentences that contain lots of stereotypes. “These kinds of idiosyncrasies probably also reduce the overall creativity,” he says. “Good writing is all about showing, not telling. AI is always telling.”

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Generative AI models have made it simpler and quicker to produce everything from text passages and images to video clips and audio tracks. Texts and media that might have taken years for humans to create can now be generated in seconds.
2. But while AI’s output can certainly seem creative, do these models actually boost human creativity?  That’s what two researchers set out to explore in new research published in Science Advances, studying how people used OpenAI’s large language model GPT-4 to write short stories.  
3. The study found that the model was helpful—but only to an extent. They found that while AI improved the output of less creative writers, it made little difference to the quality of the stories produced by writers who were already creative. The stories in which AI had played a part were also more similar to each other than those dreamed up entirely by humans. 

Full Article

(Copyright lies with the publisher)

Topics:  Creativity, Humans and Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Story-writing, Novelty