Temperature: The Climate of Creativity

I’m sitting in the lobby of a hotel, the air conditioning is in full swing. Intent on crafting a narrative, my fingers hover above the keyboard, but the chill permeating the room has me distracted. Cocooned under covers in the dead of night, this chill would be a blessing, but here, in my summer sundress, ready to brave the outside humidity, it sends an uncomfortable shiver running down my spine.?This cold lobby transports me to another uncomfortable day, standing on the subway platform, waiting. At that time, I was grappling with the frigid winds of change.?My life was a maelstrom of uncertainty, and comfort felt like a foreign concept. Yet amidst the chaos, standing on that platform, I stumbled upon an unexpected oasis of calm. The realization hit me: "In this moment, I am the perfect temperature."

Temperature, in its deceptive simplicity, sets the stage for much of our daily life. It holds power over our comfort, our concentration, our state of mind. It shapes our experiences, our interactions with our surroundings, and as I would discover, even our creative process. What does it mean to be at the 'perfect temperature'? And how can we find that sweet spot so that we thrive creatively in every climate.

When we perceive the air as being at a "perfect" temperature, it generally means that our bodies are not having to work to maintain their internal temperature. Our bodies are designed to maintain a state of homeostasis, using the mechanisms of shivering to generate heat when we are cold and sweating to cool us down. When the external temperature is such that our bodies do not have to actively work to either generate or lose heat to maintain our optimal internal temperature, we perceive the temperature as "perfect" or comfortable. Feeling that the air is the perfect temperature is a combination of external environmental conditions, the body's internal temperature regulation mechanisms, and our sensory perception all aligning to create a state of thermal comfort.

Comfort is typically shunned when we talk about creativity. We often use words and phrases like “think outside the box” or “get out of your comfort zone” or my favorite misnomer “disruptive.” But my experience being creative, living in creative communities, and managing the process of creativity in business tells me that creativity operates more often than not from a place of comfort. The difference is that people feel comfortable and uncomfortable in different creative climates.?Just like with thermal comfort, one person’s version of “cold” is another person’s idea of “hot.” In fact, according to The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), thermal comfort is defined as “the condition of mind that expresses satisfaction with the thermal environment and is assessed by subjective evaluation.”

In essence, thermal comfort is all in our heads.

Creative climates are no different. If you are looking to amplify the unexpected, it’s important to create a climate that allows for divergent thinking - an environment that allows random ideas to come into one’s field of vision and mix in unusual ways. However, it you are looking to deliver a creative work to the market, you may need to focus your attention on a smaller number of choices, paying more attention to details, clarity and precision.

This process of widening and narrowing the field of vision is what computer scientists call temperature, and is used as a way of regulating the creative process in machines to generate new content.?In fact, Generative Deep Learning, according to David Foster is all about generating outcomes that are similar to, but not identical to the training data.?“It is our goal to build a model that can generate new sets of features that look as if they have been created using the same rules as the original data,” which means that generative models are probabilistic not deterministic, by design.

Generative AI models, like ChatGPT, can be understood as advanced statistical instruments. They operate by studying and learning from vast quantities of data, with the objective of identifying and predicting patterns, particularly in human language. These models don't comprehend language as humans do; rather, their proficiency is derived from the meticulous analysis of linguistic frequency patterns.

Let's illustrate this with an example. Assume we have a phrase: "I Love __." The most frequent word to complete this expression, based on common usage, would be "You". This is the 'safest' answer, and a generative AI model with a low 'temperature' setting, akin to a low flame on a stove, would predict this. However, we can modify the model's behavior through temperature adjustments. Turning up the 'temperature' to a higher setting (1), the model is encouraged to explore more diverse possibilities, akin to turning up the heat on a stove. Rather than defaulting to the most probable word, it may produce alternatives like "chocolate," "my mother," or "puppies." These are less frequent but still contextually valid completions of the sentence.

Interestingly, this temperature manipulation influences the AI's creativity. When we increase the temperature setting, generative AI models can perform at a level comparable to the top 1% of humans on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, a recognized metric for human creative capacity. Increasing the 'temperature' allows the model to explore a wider array of potential outputs, reflecting a higher degree of linguistic diversity and perceived creativity. This dynamic nature of 'temperature' in AI models, a factor that can be manipulated to yield different results, invites an intriguing parallel to our human capacity for creative thinking and our individual comfort zones.

What if we were to think about the rules that structure our creative endeavors in the analog world in a similar way to how computer scientists write the algorithms that structure Generative AI systems??We can write rules like recipes that operate at a low temperature, producing the same results every time.?Or we can write rules that define a framework, such as the improvisational structures that underly jazz music or comedy, dialing the temperature up.?We can structure rules that structure a negotiation, establishing a balance between precision and creativity.?We can even lay out prohibitions, a seemingly strict ban that actually behaves in unintentional ways - raising the temperature to a boiling point where anything that is not prohibited is permitted.?Or, we can completely subject ourselves to the highest temperature system - the laws of chance, opening ourselves up to the whims of serendipity and the opportunities brought to us through chaos. ?

So, as the summer temperature are rising, it’s a good time to be conscious of the climate of creativity we are looking to cultivate, and to remember that creativity happens along the entire temperature spectrum.?And unlike an AI agent that does what it is instructed to do, you have your own thermal creative comfort.?Do you find yourself most at home with a recipe - a set of instructions to follow and the solace of a predictable answer, or are you someone who thrives in an atmosphere where there are no rules beyond the laws of nature?

As we come to understand what aspects of the creative process can be synthesized by machines, let’s take the opportunity to learn about how to structure the rules in human systems to recognize the complex dynamic between temperature and thermal comfort.

As for me, well....some like it hot.

I'm Lori Mazor and I teach AI with a human touch: empowering intelligent business. If you're interested in bringing Generative AI training to your employees, check out my?website?for course offerings or DM me on LinkedIn for more information.