Does AI boost creativity? Can uncertainty improve performance? All this and the weather in this week's newsletter.

Research Roundup

Well-Posed Creativity

Do LLMs boost human creativity? As with all such questions, you must also ask for whom, when, and how much?

A new study on the “causal impact of generative AI ideas on the production of short stories” found that “access to generative AI ideas causes stories to be evaluated as more creative, better written, and more enjoyable”. But there were two major caveats, (that should surprise anyone following my research):

1. the boost was largely restricted to “less creative writers”, and
2. the resulting “stories are more similar to each other than stories by humans alone”.

As the authors put it, AI might “increase…individual creativity at the risk of losing collective novelty”.

In another experiment, participants used GPT to “generate creative ideas for various everyday and innovation-related problems”. Again the “using [LLMs] increased the creativity of the generated ideas compared with not using any technology or using a conventional Web search”. But again it was “most effective at generating incrementally (versus radically) new ideas.” The particular strength seemed to be combining “remotely related concepts into a cohesive form, leading to a more articulate presentation of ideas”.

So, LLMs boosted incremental “creativity” for less creative individuals but also induced people to herd around good-enough ideas. In this way, its impact on creativity is very similar to what happens in innovation markets—better individual returns to innovation but worse market discovery. In other words, AI isn’t boosting collective creativity, it’s simply distributing information more effectively…or perhaps even too effectively.

Fearing uncertainty increases fear of uncertainty

Most of us don’t like uncertainty but that fear directly slows growth.

Taking a chance and being wrong produces a valuable “negative prediction error (PE)”, but it also produces negative emotions. To guard against the emotional impact our “expectations…tend to drift pessimistically”. This drifting expectation “transiently buffers the initial emotional impact of negative PEs but impairs PE-based learning, counterintuitively sustaining uncertainty into the future”. By being “scared” of uncertainty we propagate uncertainty into the future, robbing ourselves of the opportunity to learn that our hard work pays off!

But uncertainty doesn’t just facilitate learning, it is even a thing to be learned. When learning motor tasks, “multiple motor programmes can be acquired on the basis of the preceding uncertainty of the decision”. In fact, “decision uncertainty functions as a contextual cue” forming “distinct…memories on the basis of the preceding decision uncertainty”. We even treat novel stimuli as more similar if they share “matched uncertainty levels”.

Hiding from uncertainty not only robs us of learning opportunities but even the more sophisticated opportunity to use uncertainty itself as a clue to the future. Build yourself, your kids, and your companies to embrace uncertainty!

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Weekly Indulgence

Don’t miss my guest appearance on Navigating Noise:

Stage & Screen

• I had an amazing time last week in Rome (with the UN, World Bank, and others) and then in Copenhagen visiting both Optoceutics and Novo Nordisk's AI Day.
  • I need to start keeping count of when I'm kicked out of a venue by security. To be clear, I mean that I've stay so late answering questions and talking with the audience that burly men with tasers chase us all out. +1 for Novo Nordisk.
• December 7, London: Oxford International Speakers Panel: "What it means to be human in the age of AI"
• December 10, NYC: It's that time of year again: RFK Human Rights's Annual Gala. Another year to support our amazing work in defending journalists and civil rights defenders around the world.
  • It's sad that I must say this but...we have nothing to do with RFK Jr.
• Are you in London or NYC this December? Let's meet!

If your company, university, or conference just happen to be in one of the above locations and want the "best keynote I've ever heard" (shockingly spoken by multiple audiences last year)?

SciFi, Fantasy, & Me

I don’t have a recommendation this week, and so here’s what I’m looking forward to…

• The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami
• Service Model, Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Mercy of The Gods, 2 guys named James S.A. Corey

The Spear Cuts Through Water, Simon Jimenez

Vivienne L'Ecuyer Ming