“Mischa’s parents are hosting their daughter’s engagement party at their country mansion. As she makes a toast, her wine glass slips from her hand to reveal an object embedded in the stem – a tiny memory card. The discovery unravels a decades-old corruption scandal involving her own family, forcing her to choose between justice and loyalty.”
Not bad, I suppose. I have just asked ChatGPT to create a series of concepts for a movie, based on the creative writing prompt “Her face went still as her eyes widened, watching the glass shatter on the floor”, and this is one of its better suggestions. My aim is to develop a short outline of a plot within 30 minutes.
No, I don’t have any serious aspirations to break into Hollywood. But I wanted to test out the findings of by during his PhD at the University of British Columbia in Canada. There has been a lot of online discussion about whether algorithms will replace human brainwork, but Huang wanted to see whether AI can enhance our own creativity – and the answer depends on how much we use it. Too little or too much and our thinking suffers. In the “Goldilocks zone”, however, it can inspire new ideas that we might have never considered by ourselves, while leaving us with a satisfying sense of ownership over the work we have produced.
Sadly, I find it highly unlikely that my experiment has produced the next blockbuster, but it has helped clarify my thoughts about the nature of creativity.
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First, the theory. Huang’s hypothesis was based on the fact that human creativity is often constrained by our experience; we all carry certain assumptions that will direct our thinking in one direction, and so it can often be useful to hear from other ways of seeing the world. There is that is why teams are often more creative than individuals. But AI could also be a tool for getting a different perspective.
The technology has its limits, of course. LLMs, which are in essence statistical tools, often present a kind of “average response” to questions, without the amazing idiosyncrasies of the human brain, and they often absorb biases and prejudices from their training data. Worse still, they can undermine our own feelings of competence, producing a kind of apathy.
For these reasons, Huang suspected that moderation was key. In much the same way that Goldilocks had to find the porridge that was neither too hot, nor too cold, we should look for a medium level of engagement that is “just right”, he argued – and he assessed the idea in a series of experiments.
The first involved a classic test of creativity, in which around 150 participants were asked to assist a student named Mike in coming up with an impromptu business, given just $10 of seed funding. They were encouraged to first generate multiple ideas, before sending Mike an email setting out the best proposal in detail.
During this process, some participants were encouraged to use ChatGPT just one time, while others were recommended to employ around four to six prompts. The rest were told to use the AI at least nine times – a very high level of engagement for a 15-minute task. All participants AI at some point. Their final ideas were then assessed by expert human judges on novelty, utility and business value.
The results were exactly as Huang had predicted, with higher average scores among the participants in the middle group. To confirm the finding, he performed a second experiment with a further 319 participants, finding the same results.
Finally, he took the idea to professional creatives, through a survey of fashion designers, visual artists, authors, animators, technologists and influencers. In a questionnaire, the participants had to rate statements such as “I use artificial intelligence to carry out most of my job functions” on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Based on their bosses’ assessments, he found that those who reported moderate use of AI (around 4 or 5 on the scale) had the most creative ideas, just as his previous experiments had suggested.
During my little experiment, I could easily see the advantage. I first asked the chatbot to think up 10 different ideas in diverse genres, before picking my favourite: the concealed memory card that is released by Mischa’s glass breaking. I built on that idea by describing what I felt would be contained on the card – a series of stills from Mischa’s grandparents’ wedding – and asked the AI to offer a continuation of the plot. It suggested that the pictures contained an elegant young woman who had been erased from all the other wedding photos.
With my remaining four prompts, we explored who the woman was (a great aunt) and why she had been “disappeared” (she had witnessed her brother, Mischa’s grandfather, committing a crime). The showdown, we decided, would occur at Mischa’s own wedding.
At each stage, the AI helped broaden the range of events that I was considering, but I had to use my human mind to keep the story coherent and to create some kind of narrative arc. This almost certainly helped me come up with a more intricate plot than I could have possibly managed on my own in the time that I had. But I still have reservations.
It isn’t just the ethical issues I would have in trying to pass off an AI collaboration as my own work, and the through the algorithm’s suggestions, but what I think is lost when we outsource our thinking. I’ve recently started dabbling in writing short fiction, and I love the sensation of my synapses straining to find new connections, and the genuine sense of surprise when new motifs and themes emerge unexpectedly, connected, in some way, to my personal experience and the emotions that I am feeling. All of that was lost in this experiment.
Perhaps most seriously, I am worried about what the employment of AI might do to my long-term development. In a recent study, currently under peer review, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and her colleagues have shown that people and less persistent in the absence of the technology. I doubt this is a permanent change, but still – I hate the thought that I am somehow setting myself up for lazy thinking in the future. Writing, for me, should be a continual learning curve.
This isn’t to judge anyone who does choose to create with AI. I am sure many people can do so without stunting their intellect. But if genius really does involve more perspiration than inspiration, as the famous saying claims, I’d much prefer to sweat it out myself.
David Robson’s latest book is The Laws of Connection: 13 social strategies that will transform your life. If you have a question that you would like answered in his column, please send him a message at Ěý
