Can AI replace human creativity?
When we learn new things, information is stored in the brain’s networks. These are enhanced over time based on an individual’s life experiences. Our experiences differ hence one person’s ideas are bound to be different from the other person’s ideas. If we all share the same network system, that uniqueness will go away.
You can ask AI to do something creative and it will comply. It will write you a story or a poem. But after a while they will all end up similar to each other. What we are losing is the diversity of human ideas.
Recently I read a research paper from Georgetown University that is trying to understand if original ideas are weakening in the AI era. They studied hundreds of thousands of college admissions essays before and after ChatGPT. The study found that essays after ChatGPT launched used greater diversity of words but had fewer original ideas.
Traditionally, a well written essay with a diverse and articulate vocabulary indicated a well rounded, well read individual. Now “word diversity” is overshadowing our ability to recognize originality of ideas. Researchers are still trying to definitively determine how AI can affect the brain, but in the study, the researchers are not optimistic of these effects.
Can we use AI but not lose our creativity entirely?
The researchers suggest starting with your own ideas before we ask AI to analyze our ideas. AI can be a useful editing partner. I recently attended a UC admission seminar. They asked students to use AI to brainstorm but ultimately the experiences in their essays should be their own. As I pondered over this, and read the research paper, I came up with a strategy of how to go about using this in my own college essays and courses. Start with writing an outline of the ideas you have. Answer the “why, what and how” questions. AI can then help us with the less creative part of compiling and formatting. That would leave us more time for doing other things than spending time doing more mindless work.
Certainly there are some ways that AI can displace humans. But if we do it right, AI could push the boundaries of human creativity by freeing us from doing the mundane tasks. Some suggested tips:
- Choose wisely when and how much we should use AI: Make a conscious choice of how much of the cognitive processing you want to offload to AI. It is also important to decide at which step in our creative process we should involve AI.
- Review the results: Your prior knowledge and experience can be a valuable resource to critically evaluate what AI is presenting to you. Spending time to review what AI generated is an important step in the process of effectively elevating the use of AI, versus blindly copying and presenting the material as your own.
- Balance between efficiency and quality: AI can produce results fast but they may be mediocre and lack individuality. If we care about the quality it may take us longer putting together our our own ideas to start out with and reviewing the generated product but at the end, the result would be an elevated version of what we originally sought to create.
