Combinatorial creativity recombines existing ideas to spark novel, valuable innovations in cognition, AI, and design.
The Myth of the Instant Cake Mix
How to think about creative tooling in the new world of generative AI
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...
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.
Ideation with Generative AI—in Consumer Research and Beyond
Abstract The use of generative AI (genAI) in consumer research is rapidly evolving, with applications including synthetic data generation, data analysis, and more. However, their role in creative ideation—a cornerstone of consumer research—remains underexplored. Drawing on the human creativity literature, we propose that ideation with genAI is facilitated by its productivity and semantic breadth, which are psychologically analogous to the dual pathways of persistence and flexibility in human ideation. Further, we distinguish between the utility of genAI as a key ideator versus humans as key ideator, conceptualized through the genAI ideation roles of Designer and Writer and of Interviewer and Actor. While genAI excels in generating incremental improvements, its potential for groundbreaking innovation could be unlocked by leveraging its ability to prompt human creativity. This article advances the theoretical and practical understanding of genAI in ideation for consumer research, offering numerous practical guidelines for integrating generative AI into research while emphasizing human–AI collaboration to achieve radical insights.
Creative Computing Institute
Working at the intersection of creativity and computational technologies.
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born
Solitary work, creativity and larval ideas
Beyond the Artifact: Power as a Lens for Creativity Support Tools
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,...
Design Thinking by IDEO: Human-Centered Innovation
Learn how IDEO uses design thinking to help teams solve complex problems through human-centered innovation, creativity, collaboration, and impact.
Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art
To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence.
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
OpenProcessing - Creative Coding for the Curious Mind
OpenProcessing - Creative Coding for the Curious Mind
Beyond Slop
Visions for humane creative AI tools based on craft, process, and emergence.
Random Object Creativity Technique — Think Jar Collective
Michael Michalko shares a useful technique for generating relevant creative ideas using random words to inspire creativity.
