Hosts
Derek Thompson
Derek ThompsonAbout the episode
For generations, we’ve defined creativity by its products: the novel, the painting, the song, the breakthrough idea. We look at the work, and from the work we see the creator as “creative.” But AI is getting remarkably good at producing creative work. In some cases, experts now prefer AI-generated writing to work created by humans and can’t reliably tell the difference between the two. In fact, a major literary prize even recently honored a work that was largely written by AI.
It all raises a deeper question than whether or not AI can write well. It forces us to reconsider what creativity actually is.
Today, neuroscientist Adam Green joins the show to discuss how AI is changing the way we write, think, and generate ideas. His research finds that while AI can make our language more polished and sophisticated, it may also make our thinking more uniform. The sentences get sharper. The ideas get more predictable. And If creativity is no longer something we can recognize from the final product alone, we may need a new, more human definition.
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In the following excerpt, Derek talks to Adam Green about the brain, the creative process, and AI.
Derek Thompson: Adam Green, welcome to the show.
Adam Green: Thanks, Derek. Great to be with you.
Thompson: Tell me, who you are, and what is the question that you’re motivated by as a researcher? What are you spending your career trying to figure out?
Green: I’m a neuroscientist. I study how brains do a lot of the interesting things that they do. To me, the most interesting thing that brains do is come up with creative ideas. I’ve spent a lot of time mapping out how creative systems work in brains, and then a lot of time figuring out how we can help those systems work better by things that we do in classrooms, things that we do in labs where we actually zap brains with various forms of stimulation to help those systems work better. Then recently, there’s this new kind of creativity.
Artificial intelligence is generating ideas that we’re calling creative. I think that there’s a good case to be made for that. But one of the things that’s been fascinating to me in my lab is how that’s happening differently in these artificial systems, than it happens in our organic systems, and what that might mean for the nature of creativity. That’s something that’s really been motivating along with still zapping a lot of brains.
Thompson: Before we get into the paper that first drew my attention for this episode on student admission essays and artificial intelligence, what you just said sort of bumped me in a way. I’d love you to spell it out a little bit more. What is creativity, and what do we know about how it is produced organically in the brain?
Green: The question of what is creativity is a big one, and an old one, and somewhat hubristically, a friend of mine, James Kaufman, who’s another creativity researcher, he and I have been leading 200 creativity researchers from around the world, people who have made the terrible life choice to think about this stuff all the time in trying to answer this question. It’s a project that we call the Creativity Ontology Project. We’re trying to map out exactly what creativity means in a way that not just researchers, but teachers, and people in industry can understand it.
I think I will let you know when we get to the end of that journey, just what the world of creativity research thinks creativity is. But what I think matters about your question is what kind of creativity you’re looking for.
I think the definition of creativity has tended to slant toward the product. What I mean by that is we think of an invention or a song, and we say, “Well, that’s really creative.” We have a pretty well agreed upon standard for what we mean by creative when we’re talking about a product like an invention or a song. That’s two criteria: novel, and useful. What’s interesting to me, and this comes back to the AI question, is those are fine descriptors for a product. They’re not very good descriptors if what we mean by creativity is the process of creating, right? Creativity, the process of generating something.
I look at brains, and what brains are doing. Those descriptors, novel or useful, have nothing to do with the processes happening in your brain. You can’t use it to open a can. It’s not novel in the sense that these same systems do a lot of things. They’ve done all of those things 50 times today before you were writing your song. Neither novel nor useful is a particularly good description of creativity as a process.
We’ve done some work looking at what we mean by creativity as a process. It has a lot to do with our search through our own semantic networks, our meanings, and how that happens in a way that focuses our attention inward, and that is constrained by a generative goal. If you’re asking me what I mean by creativity, and I’m right now, as you know, at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity, and there are a bunch of people here who love to disagree about what creativity means. But if you’re asking me, and I think more and more, as we’ve moved towards studying creativity in brains, the importance of understanding creativity as a process is being brought more to the fore, I think those are the elements that matter the most.
This excerpt has been edited and condensed.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Adam Green
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman