Michael Michalko shares a useful technique for generating relevant creative ideas using random words to inspire creativity.
Reversing Assumptions Technique — Think Jar Collective
Think Jar Collective contributor and creativity expert Michael Michalko shares a technique to challenge our own assumptions and in the process spark new thinking.
Watch and Link Disparate Ideas — Think Jar Collective
An important skill to develop to enhance thinking creatively is to be able to link disparate ideas. This article lays out some provocations to spark creative collisions for innovation
Measuring Combinatorial Creativity in Large Language Models and Humans
Combinatorial creativity, the process of combining familiar ideas in unfamiliar ways, is one of the foremost engines of scientific, technological, and artistic progress. This work introduces Kombine, an LLM benchmark for combinatorial creativity tasking models to discover surprising, original, and useful associations, analogies, and blends between unrelated entities, and to use those analogies and blends to invent novel concepts by re-combining the parts of existing ones. In a large-scale study across 35 LLMs, we find that: (1) LLMs are 10-16 percentage points better at discovering associations and analogies than blends, and (2) exhibit an abstraction bottleneck on blending, in which even frontier LLMs struggle to find a shared abstraction between inputs and instantiate a coherent blended space. (3) LLMs also exhibit inventive homogeneity, in which one in five concepts invented for a given item reuses properties invented by another model. Moreover, (4) models are $14\times$ more likely to reuse other invented properties on blends than analogies, and (5) models from the same provider are $2.3\times$ more likely to reuse properties than those from different providers. Next, in a comparative study involving 75 humans on the same tasks, we find that (6) humans score below nearly every LLM on each task and (7) both humans and LLMs find blending most difficult, but association is easier than analogy for LLMs, while analogy is easier than association for humans. Lastly, (8) humans and LLMs access distinct regions of semantic space on each task, suggesting that combinatorial creativity could benefit from systematic human-AI collaboration to enhance conceptual diversity. In summary, we provide a framework to assess progress towards LLMs, AI systems, and human-AI collaborations more broadly, that can elicit combinatorial creativity in a setting relevant to scientific and technological innovation.
Combinatorial Creativity
Combinatorial creativity recombines existing ideas to spark novel, valuable innovations in cognition, AI, and design.
Creative Computing Group by @tgoerke.bsky.social — Grain
Let's start a group at CODIP to explore creative computing. Let's not start by defining creativity nor computing. It would be a trap. Let's collect artifacts instead. Images, text, thoughts,...
The Evolution of Creativity
Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
Worst Possible Idea
There are many brainstorming methods (including bodystorming, p.30, brainwriting 6-3-5, p.32 and group passing, p.82) that are each useful in different circumstances. However, sometimes it can be difficult for people in a group setting to generate ideas. This may be because people are too stuck in current ways of thinking, or they might be concerned about being judged by others for the ideas they propose. Giving people the permission to come up with their worst possible ideas creates a playful, safe environment and helps to get a brainstorming session off to a good start. Ideas might build on each other during the process, and it is indeed possible to generate an idea or way of thinking about the problem that can be fed back into the design process. Managers that have used this method with their teams report that it outperforms by far any other brainstorming method (Dorf, 2017), largely because of its ability to energise a room and enable lateral thinking.
Essential Randomness — Ms Boba's Emporium of Weirdness
Ms Boba's experimental website. Open for business while construction is ongoing.
Essential Randomness — Ms Boba's Emporium of Weirdness
Ms Boba's experimental website. Open for business while construction is ongoing.
Beyond the Artifact: Power as a Lens for Creativity Support Tools
Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content
Creativity is core to being human. Generative artificial intelligence (AI)—including powerful large language models (LLMs)—holds promise for humans to be more creative by offering new ideas, or less creative by anchoring on generative AI ideas. We study the causal impact of generative AI ideas on the production of short stories in an online experiment where some writers obtained story ideas from an LLM. 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. 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. This dynamic resembles a social dilemma: With generative AI, writers are individually better off, but collectively a narrower scope of novel content is produced. Our results have implications for researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners interested in bolstering creativity. , Generative AI can enhance the creativity of short stories but may limit the variation in diverse outputs.
Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content
Creativity is core to being human. Generative artificial intelligence (AI)—including powerful large language models (LLMs)—holds promise for humans to be more creative by offering new ideas, or less creative by anchoring on generative AI ideas. We study the causal impact of generative AI ideas on the production of short stories in an online experiment where some writers obtained story ideas from an LLM. 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. 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. This dynamic resembles a social dilemma: With generative AI, writers are individually better off, but collectively a narrower scope of novel content is produced. Our results have implications for researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners interested in bolstering creativity. , Generative AI can enhance the creativity of short stories but may limit the variation in diverse outputs.
What Makes Us Smart?
Human creativity does not solely rely on our individual cognitive abilities, but instead emerges from the recombination of ideas, practices, and approaches that result from social interactions and id...
The Myth of the Instant Cake Mix
How to think about creative tooling in the new world of generative AI
Great creative work is usually the product of a single person