Re-imagining creativity with AI

AI looks set to reshape the way we work, and some worry that it might take over the creative work that humans do. But we believe this isn’t true at all. In fact, AI works best when it teams up with human creativity, not when it tries to replace it. AI helps bring out the special things that only humans can do creatively.

We caught up with Spiro Comitis to explore how we can combine essential human traits with AI to come up with really new and exciting changes, especially in business.

Watch the video or read the full transcript below.

Everybody thinks because of what AI can do on the creative front, that there is no need for creativity anymore. Nothing could be further from the truth. The interesting thing about AI is when you look at how it’s been produced by different people, the quality that you get is so different. What they’re able to do is inject emotion, inject personality, inject real kind of creativity into it. It just goes to show us how much your own skill is necessary to use AI effectively.

There are three traits that define what makes someone creative. Curiosity, imagination and irreverence. We are, as humans, innately curious. AI is not. When we use imagination, AI doesn’t use imagination unless we actually prompt it to do so. Our ability to really think outside of the box is not what AI is designed to do.

What we really need on a global scale is businesses creating completely new business models and transforming their whole industry to be much more sustainable. Those are the kind of complex problems that really need creativity to drive them and can be augmented by how we use AI to solve them. What AI does is it gives us the cognitive capacity to actually deal with that complexity. It is almost like we’ve got three hemispheres now. We’ve got a rational, a creative and an AI third hemisphere that provides that cognitive synthesis.

The biggest thing that any kind of transformation needs is new thinking. That more than anything needs human creativity. It needs that curiosity and imagination to design it and then the horsepower of AI to make it happen. There is a lot of research that shows if you combine human ingenuity with AI, you can improve innovation by 30%. If we think about the future of jobs, not as human or AI but human and AI and a better process, I think that is kind of where the power of the future comes from.

We are so early on this that the best thing we can actually do is practice. Make sure that we’re actually intentional about our creativity and AI and that we’re actually just carving up some time. Even an hour or two is all we need to actually get started. There is an interesting paradox in creativity that what it needs is both space and boundaries. We have to make the time for it but we have to make the constraints. It is like trying to inflate a balloon without the membrane. The air just dissipates everywhere. We have to apply our creativity to something.

Having these complex problems is a great way of using the creativity that we have got, taking the power that AI has to synthesise and putting those together to solve them.