Kasie is stuck. Tasked with presenting several new marketing strategies at her team’s next meeting, the only ideas that come to mind are ones she’s used in the past. Given that her manager has asked her to be innovative, these ideas won’t work. She considers opening an AI platform but hesitates, thinking, “I can’t give in and rely on AI for everything! I’m supposed to come up with these ideas on my own.”
Kasie isn’t the only one struggling with this dilemma, partly because we’re still learning about AI’s ability to help us be creative. A recent survey of over 250 marketing professionals found that about 59% of them believed AI to have a positive effect on their creativity. In another survey, 54% believed AI would improve written content. This suggests that just under half the population remains skeptical.
On the one hand, AI may enhance creativity by providing potential starting points — a stepping stone toward a creative new idea, helping us overcome “writer’s block” or an impasse. However, others feel AI may dampen creativity by anchoring us to a specific idea or starting point. In this case, AI may restrict the variability of our ideas from the start, making us less creative overall.
In addition, AI’s offerings may stem from already-used ideas, limiting us from developing truly new and creative ones. But, recent work suggests that asking AI for help with an idea may not limit us but in fact open up creative possibilities.
Creative help in the form of an AI prompt
In the new study, researchers explored how much help generative AI could offer to a person writing a short story, and moreover, how creative it was. Participants were asked to write a brief story about a random topic to a target audience. They were asked to do so in one of three ways: generate the story without any AI help, access one idea from a generative AI resource, or access up to five ideas from a generative AI resource.
Each short story was evaluated by a group of about 600 people who reported on two aspects often associated with creativity: novelty (whether the story breaks from the status quo) and usefulness (the practicality of adapting the story into another form, like a movie or book).
It turns out that asking AI for some ideas can actually help boost a person’s creativity. Researchers discovered that the people who were able to access up to five ideas from the generative AI resource wrote stories that were judged to be more novel and useful than the other two groups. They were also rated as being better written and more enjoyable to read.
Does this mean that all of us can now become more creative? Not necessarily. Looking a bit deeper into their data reveals that people who were inherently less creative, as determined prior to the experiment using a divergent association task, experienced a greater creative boost by using AI. When having access to five AI-generated ideas, their stories were about 10% more creative and about 25% more enjoyable and well-written than stories written solely with human-generated ideas.
Combined with prior research on creativity, this study suggests that AI may help unlock creativity in people who naturally struggle to come up with useful new ideas. At the same time, the most inherently creative individuals did not experience a boost. So for the time being, AI-generated ideas may not push the upper bounds of creativity beyond what particularly creative humans are capable of on their own.
The neuroscience of creativity and how AI can help unlock it
Creativity is often defined as thought that is both original and useful in solving a problem or viewing a concept. As a way to measure an individual’s level of creativity, researchers often use divergent thinking — the ability to generate many possible solutions to a problem or question. And while this is a great way to describe creative output, what about the creative process — the part that happens before the idea? This is where we begin to understand how AI may help us get more creative ideas.
Neuroimaging studies reveal that creative thinking involves the coordination of many distinct brain areas. Specifically, our cognitive or executive control network, including the prefrontal cortex, engages at the same time as our default mode network, which is most active during mind wandering or daydreaming.
Interestingly, these areas don’t typically engage at the same time, but this is one instance where they seem to work together. Along with these networks, our brain’s reward network engages, reinforcing the idea that creative thinking is rewarding — yet another reason we should encourage ourselves and others to tap into these creative networks.
What this research suggests is that for us to think creatively, we need to increase the connectivity between these areas of the brain. In fact, research has shown that artificially stimulating these brain areas can increase an individual’s creative outputs. Leveraging AI may be doing something similar: triggering one of our quieter mental maps and starting the process of linking prior ideas together that we normally wouldn’t, leading to a new type of outcome.
Adding a new tool to the toolbox
It’s true that some of us have an easier time opening the floodgates of our creativity. But for those who need a bit of help, research suggests there are several ways to boost creative thinking. Here are some research-backed tools to consider:
Budget time for mind wandering
Creativity involves engagement of our mind-wandering network, so provide yourself time to do just that. You might set aside 10 minutes at the beginning of each day before logging onto your computer or checking your calendar. Or maybe step outside: Research suggests that nature can widen your perspective and enhance your ability to mind wander.
Practice creativity
While insights, or aha moments, can help generate a creative idea, being creative is also considered a skill — one that can be honed and improved. This could be as simple as setting aside time for brainstorming and writing down whatever thoughts or ideas come to mind, no matter how wild. This helps your brain get used to making remote connections.
Use AI to get you started
Finally, the current study suggests that we may also be able to ask AI for help in a pinch. If we’re intentional about the prompts we use, AI can provide some options for us to get started making those disparate connections. However, it’s important to note that when all of the short stories were compared, the researchers found that the creative variance was low. In other words, AI was good at coming up with creative ideas, but nothing truly groundbreaking.
Where do we go from here? Like Kasie, we can use this research to help us get unstuck. AI can be highly effective at offering prompts or examples to try and, in some cases, helping to enhance creativity for those who struggle. But as a creative force, it’s still no match for the human brain’s capacity for imagination. Use AI to get started, but once you’re off and running, rely on your own brain to reach the finish line.
