Creative Input is Like This…

Creative output is a lot like a smoothie, the quality of the inputs matters a lot. 

Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School, studies entrepreneurship and innovation.  His recent Substack grapples with the implications of our new AI-haunted era.

A recent essay highlights several interesting creativity studies: Human vs. AI.

The upshot? AI is quite adept at ideating real-world creative solutions. It rivals and even surpasses human creativity.

Mollick’s conclusions from the studies:

• AI can generate creative ideas in real-life, practical situations. It can also help people generate better ideas.

• The ideas AI generates are better than what most people can come up with, but very creative people will beat the AI (at least for now), and may benefit less from using AI to generate ideas

• There is more underlying similarity in the ideas that the current generation of AIs produce than among ideas generated by a large number of humans

Yet, like a product user brief to a product solution, the quality of human prompts (with added constraints!) matters to the AI output. However, the prompts need not be perfect to get results.

And, since it scours existing data sets, AI excels at novel combinations of existing solutions. Since most innovations are merely recombinations of existing ideas, this is good news.

What does this mean for us going forward? AI will enable a great democratization of creativity.

But it is still the human that provides the motivation and much of the creative thinking skills via prompting. At least for now!

Don’t forget to try some of Ethan’s prompting suggestions too. Feed that blender.

It’s smoothie time!