AI is capable of playing a role in boosting innovation and creativity, but at the same time may dampen it as well. For those who struggle to formulate new ideas, it’s a great help. For those predisposed to creative instincts, AI is not necessarily needed.
These are the conclusions of a creativity research study recently reported in Science Advances, with mixed results for AI’s impact on creativity.
People predisposed toward creative thinking may see little impact with GPT-4-based AI assistants, the researchers, Anil Doshi of the UCL School of Management and Oliver Hauser of the University of Exeter, conclude. Those with lower creative talents, however, benefit the most. “Less creative writers experience greater uplifts for their stories, seeing increases of 10% to 11% for creativity and of 22% to 26% for how enjoyable and well written the story is,” they observed,
Doshi and Hauser identified the creative quotient of 293 participants, and then asked them write stories on which they were evaluated for the creativity of their work. Some were assisted by AI, others weren’t.
The greatest risk with AI-assisted creativity is the homogenization of ideas and perspectives, they find. “We find that access to generative AI ideas causes stories to be evaluated as more creative, better written, and more enjoyable, especially among less creative writers,” they conclude. “However, generative AI-enabled stories are more similar to each other than stories by humans alone. These results point to an increase in individual creativity at the risk of losing collective novelty.”
The popularity of AI — particularly generative AI — may also lead to its watering down. “Innovation is primarily a human skill with a heightened sixth-sense thinking,” said Adrian McKnight, chief digital officer at WNS Global Services. “AI is a broadly available capability, and generally, there is no competitive advantage in things that are broadly available. Too much reliance on AI is unlikely to deliver success.”
What are the implications for business beyond creative content? Business leaders see AI as an important amplifier and enabler of innovation, and agree that it has its limits when it comes to creative processes. AI needs to be a partnership between human ingenuity that is assisted by machines. People will always be needed to drive innovation.
A drawback with AI-assisted creativity is insights generated are limited to the data on hand. “AI systems, in general, are good at learning patterns from history but can struggle when presented with previously unseen new situations,” said Sai Buddhavarapu, vice president of growth design and user experience at Blue Yonder. “Innovation is about new thinking, and human ingenuity assisted by AI is the recipe for innovation rather than relying on AI alone.”
While AI can improve the speed and quality of idea development, “it is best used to augment our own thinking,” said McKnight. “This simply means that people are the prime movers and decision-makers, and they must look at AI as an extremely capable partner in co-creating their business. It is the executive’s responsibility to bring clarity of vision, and AI will always be the partner that needs their guidance and direction. Becoming too reliant or believing that AI will produce the right answer is a slippery slope and can easily lead to failure.”
AI is promising to businesses because it can help catalyze creative thinking by taking more mundane work out of the equation. “It gives people a higher capacity for creative and collaborative work and newfound agility,” said Graham Sheldon, chief product officer with UiPath. “Thanks to GenAl and new analytic techniques, much of the undesirable, repetitive daily work—things like reading documents, parsing unstructured communications, and extracting, compiling, and entering data—can now be automated. For example, with AI and automation extracting information from invoices or comparing contracts, humans use their time for making corrections, problem solving, and final decision-making.”
Beyond taking over mundane tasks, Ai may ultimately begin to enhance the creativity seen within organizations, opening new approaches to thinking. “When AI and automation are combined for end-to-end processes, it helps bring ideas to light and put them into operation,” said Sheldon. ”This is leading to a fundamental shift in how we approach work. People will have much greater capacity to make connections across systems with AI and discover insights that can lead to new business opportunities.”
Generative AI, “by its ability to generate new content, can augment creativity and assist in innovation,” said Buddhavarapu. “It helps refine and generate new ideas – unlocking a new cycle of innovation and growth. Using AI, businesses can hyper-personalize their products, services, and experiences to an individual customer’s needs and preferences.”
As Sheldon put it: “it’s important to keep a simple truth in mind: here are things that humans are great at doing, and there are things AI is great at doing.”
