TL:DR – Will AI cultivate or curb our creativity? Yes and no. It will be a useful tool for some people and useless to others. It will be abused by yet others.
You may have noticed I’ve been using the ChatGPT language model and some image generation tools like MidJourney recently to produce some material for the blog. Mostly, it has been experimentation to see what these so-called AI tools might be capable of.
They’re all very clever but also very limited. At least as far as the free ones are concerned. I’ve not tried any of the paid tools and have no idea how powerful any of the under-the-counter AI tools are.
ChatGPT is essentially a very, very, very sophisticated autocomplete tool. At the basic level, autocomplete kicks in on your phone when you’re typing a message or in a search engine. Based on prior activity or training with a database, autocomplete suggests what word might come next after you type your first one or two. It’s statistical. If I start typing “I love…”, the chances are the next word is going to be a subject of that love, it could be “you”, “coffee”, “sciencebase” etc. Usually, the autocomplete will give you options and you can click or tap to complete the phrase “I love sciencebase”. That’s the most obvious one isn’t it?
Such simple autocomplete tools may have some initial built-in training, common phrases for instance, they may also learn from you each time you complete a phrase yourself or accept of correct the software’s suggestions. Now, picture ChatGPT as simply having a much broader training. It has been trained on a huge body of text from the internet up to the year 2021, apparently for the free version. So, when you type something for it to “autocomplete” it has lots and lots of potential phrases with which it could respond, it also has the potential to begin a response and to add the most likely phrases to follow its initial response and so build up a sophisticated answer. Have a look at some of the articles I’ve written where I demonstrate its prompt-responses. They are in the Sciencebase AI category.
If ChatGPT and similar tools are an incredibly sophisticated autocomplete tool, then you might perceive your original prompt as being like a creative spark. You have to imagine what you want to get back from the bot and devise a sophisticated prompt to make it happen.
Now, there is a lot of discussion of the ethics of all this, is the content generated by the bot original or are their copyright issues, particularly if it uses original work and is simply creating derivatives of that work? Is it plagiarism to use generated content? Is it unethical to use it to write a professional article or a student essay. I would say that at this stage in the evolution of AI, it’s probably best that users come clean and I have done so with all of the material where I have used AI. Indeed, mentioning AI was the main point of the material in the first place, so it would be pointless to not explain what I was doing in those articles.
But, as the field matures, it may be that we begin to perceive AI as just another tool. These days, nobody baulks at our using a spellchecker or a proofing tool to check our written content. Indeed, back in the day the main focus of editors and proofreaders was the laborious job of checking spelling, grammar, syntax and formating. These days, most publishers expect their authors to do that themselves and to provide clean copy almost page ready. So, it makes sense for writers to automate those kinds of checks.
I suspect that certain aspects of writing, such as creating an executive summary of a white paper or another long document, might become an automated task for a bot. The prompt would be a quick-click in one’s word processor that takes the whole text and summarises it or creates a list of bullet points. I recall having a macro tool for Microsoft Word back in the 1990s that could summarise a long document quite quickly, so even that’s nothing new.
There will also be times when there is a need to express one’s thoughts in a different way, so a prompt of drafted ideas given to the bot with a styleguide might be a useful way in which to generate a different perspective. Indeed, in one of my posts on this subject, I asked ChatGPT to analyse on old blog post of mine for style and writing level and to then take another piece of text and to rejig it into that blog style. It worked quite well. I must concede that there were a few phrases I would never use and at least one point that it made that I knew to be factually incorrect. So you would have to be very careful if you were to use the tool in this way not to generate misleading content.
In terms of creativity, there is plenty of room for that. I don’t think these AI tools are going to preclude the creative process. Indeed, it sometimes takes longer to come up with the perfect prompt to generate the content you need than it would to simply generate the content yourself. That said, I have found that even with a well-crafted prompt, it seems like much of the material that bounces back from the bots is not quite what one would expect for whatever purpose, although it is useful in the articles as a demonstration of what can be done. I have attempted to use AI to come up with headlines for some of the blog posts about AI here. Usually, it makes a rather incongruous or boring suggestions but uses a word that triggers something in me and makes me think of something snappier, wittier, or crisper.
Maybe that’s how these tools will evolve. We will quickly get bored of their output. Educators and editors will learn to recognise that an article or essay has been generated rather than written, but the writers will be inspired by the responses to their creative prompts.
I had some other software in the 1990s called Idea Fisher that came on 20 or so floppy discs and almost filled the hard drive on my PC, I used it once or twice, it was essentially a tool for generating new ideas from a database by creating juxtapositions from the prompts you gave it…it was a bit like my experience with bots in the last few weeks. Usually, the ideas were intriguing in their own way, but never quite what I needed, but a word or a phrase nudged me in a different direction just as a conversation with a friend or colleague might but without the need to disturb their working day or risk being invoiced.
I have written this blog post as something of a stream of conscious. I have not edited it other than using a tool (Grammarly) to check spelling and spot obvious grammatical errors. I am, however, sorely tempted to run it through ChatGPT not only to ask it to tidy up the writing style a bit, but also perhaps to ask it to validate my assertions. It seems to be able to do that with some text. But, I may just leave it as it is. An article, an essay, created by the neural networks in my head rather than in somebody else’s computer.
I did give ChatGPT the article and asked it to write a one-sentence summary. It did that quite well, but it missed the point that I feel these AI bots will simply become everyday tools for enhancing creativity and helping us organise our thoughts and generate new ideas ourselves. This is its summary:
The ChatGPT language model is a sophisticated autocomplete tool that has been trained on a vast amount of text from the internet, making it capable of generating sophisticated responses to prompts, with potential for use in writing and summarizing tasks, but with ethical and factual limitations.
I prompted it further to mention that I thought it had missed the point and it basically bounced back exactly what I’d said but with different words in a different order:
AI can certainly play a significant role in enhancing creativity and serving as a tool to help individuals organize their thoughts and generate new ideas. AI technologies such as natural language processing, machine learning, and neural networks can assist in the creative process by providing suggestions and generating content based on a set of parameters. Additionally, AI can also analyze large amounts of data to identify patterns and relationships that may not be immediately apparent to humans, helping individuals to make connections and arrive at new insights. Overall, AI has the potential to act as a catalyst for human creativity, providing new ways to think about problems and explore possibilities.
I asked it to come up with a title for this article based on its final summary:
Unleashing the Power of AI: Transforming the Way We Think, Create, and Innovate
My take on that would be to word it like this: “Is AI a tool to cultivate or curb our creativity”
