Using AI for creative pursuits? Moderation is key

There is a “Goldilocks zone” for AI use during creative pursuits Clare Jackson/Alamy “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 a recent paper by Hsuan-Che Brad Huang 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. Huang’s hypothesis was based on the fact that human creativity is often constrained ; 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 evidence 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.