Does A.I. limit our creativity?
- sciart0
- Jul 2
- 1 min read
KEY TAKEAWAYS
ChatGPT boosts the quality of ideas but also reduces variety.
Repetitive prompts and the design of AI models can lead to overlapping, less diverse responses.
For innovation to thrive, teams must deliberately protect and promote a diversity of ideas.
Excerpt to 1st link above: "As more companies look to tools like ChatGPT to supercharge creativity, a new study out of Wharton offers a word of caution: Generative AI may boost individual performance, but it can also limit how teams think.
New research co-authored by Wharton professors Gideon Nave and Christian Terwiesch finds that while ChatGPT improves the quality of individual ideas, it also leads groups to generate more similar ideas, reducing the variety that’s essential for breakthrough innovation.
The takeaway? AI might sharpen your pitch, but it could flatten your team’s thinking. As Terwiesch, co-director of Wharton’s Mack Institute, put it: “The ideas are great, but not as diverse as human-generated ideas. That points to a trade-off to be aware of: If you rely on ChatGPT as your only creative advisor, you’ll soon run out of ideas, because they’re too similar to each other.”
The study, led by Mack Institute research fellow Lennart Meincke, revisits and extends earlier experiments by researchers who found that participants using ChatGPT during creative tasks produced more original and useful ideas, outperforming both unaided individuals and those using search engines."