The creative potential of AI

From monitoring and analyzing stakeholder communications, to providing general support, artificial intelligence (AI) is already seamlessly integrated into our everyday workflows. With the ability to create new content such as text, images, and videos, questions arise about the creative potential of AI.

Creativity as a human skill?

There is a prevailing view that the ability to be creative is a part of what separates humans from AI.

In general, creativity can be seen as the creation and implementation of something new and useful. It can be distinguished from the everyday level to higher levels of creative achievement:

Measuring creativity

Haase and Hanel focused on the extent AI can produce new and useful outputs given an every-day creative task. The study used a standardized measure of creativity to assess broad associative thinking.

To be considered a useful assistance for humans working on creative tasks, AI tools would need to demonstrate at least a medium level of performance. The results showed no qualitative difference in creativity between AI- and human-generated responses. This suggest that AIs are valuable assistants in the creative process.

Human versus artificial creativity

The authors‘ research showed that, from a scientific perspective, AI can be creative, as its output was judged to be comparable to human output by both human and AI raters.

However, some critics have argued that chatbots cannot achieve the creativity of humans, because AI…

1. …is disconnected from the real world, with emotions and imagination.

However, the authors point out that human creativity often involves recombining existing knowledge rather than developing entirely new concepts. Brain scan analyses show that the process of idea generation in humans is similar to knowledge retrieval. In this sense, humans, much like generative AIs, retrieve and recombine existing information to produce what appears to be new. Given this similarity, AI’s vast databases provide a broader base for potential idea recombination than any human could possess.

2. … is incapable of highly creative work.

However, the human creation of entirely new ideas, especially those with significant impact, is rare and typically builds on a cumulative tradition of knowledge within specific domains. While AI may struggle to achieve the highest levels of creativity, this limitation is not unique to machines but is also a common human experience.

»Whether GAI [Generative Artifical Intellience] is creative is not the right question, as it is about the perceptually creative output.«

Haase & Hanel, Humboldt University Berlin

Moreover, the „creation and implementation of something new and useful“ definition of creativity does not require these two elements and is not tied to inherently human attributes such as experience and emotion. Therefore, for AI systems to be recognized as creative, they do not need to emulate the attitudes, behaviors, or actions of creative humans.

Instead, they must replicate the cognitive process and produce results that are perceived as „new and useful“. This perspective shifts the focus to the quality and originality of the creation itself.

Conclusion: AI as artifical muses

Taken together, generative AI can be a valuable assistant in the creative process, especially on an everyday level. However, when AI is used to solve a creative task, then the human must write a prompt that best represents the creative problem. In this way, the prompt defines the creative problem. As a result, generative AI is limited in the overall creative process. It cannot initiate creativity on its own, but can only respond to a given prompt.

The task of defining the problem remains uniquely human, as does the evaluation of whether an idea adequately addresses the problem.

This dependency highlights: While generative AI can significantly assist the creative process, it cannot fully replace the human element of defining and evaluating creative problems.

»This speaks for the merging of human and artificial competencies in the form of augmented creativity – which is the most optimistic and benevolent future development for the usage of AI«

Haase & Hanel, Humboldt University Berlin

About the paper

This article summarizes the results of a study by Jennifer Haase and Paul H.P. Hanel of Humboldt University Berlin.

Source: Haase, J. & Hanel, P. (2023) Artificial muses: Generative artificial intelligence chatbots have risen to human-level creativity, Journal of Creativity, Volume 33, Issue 3, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yjoc.2023.100066.

Further readings

• Forbes: The Intersection Of AI And Human Creativity: Can Machines Really Be Creative? (2023)
• Harvard Business Review: How Generative AI Can Augment Human Creativity (2023)