Uncreative generative AI can help us understand what real creativity is

Real creativity is not endangered – it’s more relevant than ever

We are certainly living in times with a rising presence of generative AI, which mechanically can produce brand new content at the push of a button. These software can produce interesting, useful, and dangerous content. But can it replace real creativity? To answer this question, we need to understand what real creativity is – and what it is not.

Real creativity comes from skillful, deep craftmanship and emergence, eventually reaching something that’s both useful and true. To succeed, you need to conduct many complete attempts within a delimited area, then ideas arise that move you closer to something truly believable. But, it only gets interesting if you keep going – operating a humble approach of emergence. In short, emergence is complex output from simple components. Emergence exists both in nature and in creation and the beauty of emergence is that you get surprised when looking at the result, even though you’ve seen all the parts. Even if you have seen hydrogen and helium, you’d be overwhelmed the first time you see a nebula. The sum is greater than the parts.

Through this, and upcoming articles, we will explore and elaborate on the topic of real creativity and innovation; and principles that your organization can utilize to bring out true value and higher efficiency from your ambitions within creativity and innovation.

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The current view of creativity is false – or: when one plus one equals zero

Think back to school and your favorite teacher. It’s most probably not the person who taught you the most facts, not even the one who treated you with the most respect, but the teacher that made the stories come alive. Who made the subject feel true. In a similar manner, humans have an inherent understanding of what true creativity is by nature, you can feel it in your body. AI might give you facts, that sometimes might be correct, but are the ideas alive? Do they stir something within you, or do they simply inform you?

A traditional industrial conglomerate once described the creativity-process in their innovation lab as putting together an overhaul of consumer trends and brainstorming a long list of ideas that were paired with these trends. This is a classic approach to creativity and innovation that can be found around the world. However, the issue is that at this stage you have not even started the real creative process.

The kind of ideas that arises in this context might be fun, trendy, or conspicuous, but they are unlikely to add any real creative value to the current portfolio in relation to the business proposition. This quantity seeking approach of brainstorming does not leave room for friction and debate. It’s not radical nor fearless. In a process where impact of ideas is debated in depth, fragmented ideas like these would not survive. Even if the idea is brilliant on paper, without depth you have nothing. Real creativity eats brainstorming for breakfast.

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In times when we are presented to an incalculable number of generative AI tools, we are spoon-fed with audio, graphics, and text generated by AI. It might be tempting to delegate your next creative project to generative AI. Naturally, these software must be very creative coming up with all this new content? Or perhaps, it is not creativity at all.

What generative AI does, is something very similar to the brainstorming process and trend mapping that we just described. At the risk of sounding harsh, the output you will get is just a collage. The algorithms will process incalculable and incoherent input beyond recognition and spit out something that is suspiciously similar to machine made plagiarism at scale.

Now, it should be mentioned that this is a depiction of the current state of generative AI. What today’s software are lacking is consciousness, awareness, and sensitivity. Until we get there, it’s just a dead machine talking. Exactly what the future generations of AI will look like is hard to predict, but believable creativity that the recipient can feel is true will most likely never be replaced by AI. It’s even worth questioning if consciousness AI is something ethical that we want to create?

Those authors, artists, and actors that creates something original, intangible, and who truly delivers real chemistry must not be underestimated. Creativity is something magical. It cannot be institutionalized or measured in an intellectual dimension. But we all have that magic, it is somehow felt, more than can be described in emotions. Beyond is raw truth. Not manufactured. Not intellectual. Not instinct. It’s something else.

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Make people ask: “how could it be any other way?”

When a crowd look at an artwork by an artist like Banksy, there are universal unifying factors. Regardless of your subjective impression of the painting, there seems to be an objective and universally felt truth that comes alive in a majority of people, getting an equal and consistent reaction. A feeling of receiving new information and insights that you did not have before your encounter with the object. To create something like this you don’t need a brainstorming meeting, you need tremendous skill.

Naturally, this is not only true for paintings and sculptures, but also other artforms such as composing or performing music. Think about Beethoven or Yo-Yo Ma. Even if you subjectively do not appreciate classical music there is a bridging agreement that the creativity somehow can be felt. But this is not only applicable to art in the traditional meaning, but to tech, design, and nature. Think back to the launch of the original iPhone, or to a magnificent oak on a summer meadow. Pieces of art that feels essential and existential: how could they possible be in any other way?

This mindset should be the beacon to measure creativity against. An inherent feeling within the customer, stakeholder, or end user that there is no other way that this product, process, or service could ever have been designed in that would feel as natural, believable, and true.

But real creativity also has another element to it as it combines truth with what is perceived as useful. If it lacks the sense of utility, it’s just a fun gadget. The usefulness is however entangled with the truth attribute. On a fundamental level one could therefore argue that Für Elise, the oak, and the iPhone are all equally useful. What is true is also useful, as it fulfills a purpose, a longing for reality.

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Detecting non-creativity and steering with real creativity

So far, we have looked into what creativity is, and what it is not. An alternative approach to understanding real creativity could be to use the output of AI as a reversed definition.

Let’s do this by scrutinizing three key features of creativity.

Fundamental understanding of the issue. AI tools can show you what others have to say about the topic, it can aggregate large quantities of data, but it can itself never grasp the problematization of the underlying factors. Imagine if you truly want to understand how a combustion engine works. What would give you the fundamental understanding: reading an encyclopedia or get your hands dirty disassembling and then reassembling a tangible engine?

Natural spontaneity. If biological research cannot explain how a thought arises in the human brain, how can we expect to recreate that process of original thoughts in AI? There will never be any spontaneity, free associations, or stream of consciousness in AI’s output. Creativity is rarely logical, based on known and structures and patterns. It’s creating something new, unheard of. AI is based on pre-defined rules, restrictions, and statistical probabilities. Imagine kids at the playground, the swing that was a racing car minutes ago is now a pirate ship. If you have pre-defined the ground as tarmac, how will you ever find the treasure on the deserted island?

The significance in situation-based information hierarchy. If AI cannot understand the difference in value between relevant and irrelevant information, how can we ever trust that it will provide us with useful output? If all input is deemed to be of the same relevance, how can the output ever become relevant for your specific use case? If a group of people, say a book circle, all read the same book and were asked to retell the story, most probably, they would use different angles. As they have various educational backgrounds, come from diverse cultures, and all have unique experiences and outlooks on life. What was the main theme in the book to one person might be completely skipped by another.

But AI tools are not useless, on the contrary. If they can help us define what non-creativity is, they can also determine the antonym: real creativity. By using AI as a bullshit detector, you can find out if a role, process, or product truly is creativity or not. If AI can serve as a replacement, then it was never creative in the first place. This can mean two things, either creativity is not needed in this circumstance, and you can save resources by using AI, what you thought needed creativity could actually be automated. But it can also mean that your current process completely lacks creativity, and you need to replace it with real creativity.

It's worth noting that even though AI is not creative, you can be creative with the support of AI if used as any assistant and the output is taken for what it is – a game of pick-up sticks. A tool for the focused mind, aware of the limitations, and with enough integrity to stand up for the creative process. But just as a human assistant, you have to be aware that it’s will not be free from bias. AI does not only process data, but it also contaminates and censors it following world view of its creator.

In short, use AI to find out if your process is creative and not, and then you either replace the current process with AI or you turn it around completely. If AI can do your work or produce something equally good to what you are capable of, don’t be amazed how much AI can achieve, be horrified of how little you are able to. That’s the harsh reality.

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Creativity by creation

American neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman have made the following analogy to explain creativity: “It’s like you have to wade through sewage before you can swim in clear water”. In other words, you become more creative the more you create. There is no other way to the clear water than to go through that sewage. If you want to create something new and original, and turn to AI, you might think that you dive into the clear water straight away, but that’s just as conceited as the emperor’s new clothes. You might see clear water, but the rest of us see that you are still in the sewage. We feel that this is in fact not a revolutionary idea, even if not everyone dares to point it out.

In its essence, what you have in your hands is a mere lump of clay, to work it out to something that is useful and true, you need two things. A high degree of skill and respect for the craft, as well as humbleness and an open mind as to what you might come across along the way.

In every process of creation, you are a toddler taking their first steps. You cannot skip the gradual learning phase and fast forward. The creative process needs to follow a contextless bottom-up approach where insights are gathered and implemented along the way. This is the humbleness. But one cannot neglect the impact of skill. If you do not have the expertise and the experience from 10?000 hours of respectfully understanding the craft, your improvisation and creativity will result in nothing. However, if you have done the groundwork, and built up talent over years, you might be able to create something that’s true and useful.

Don’t waste time finding out where to go – work on how you should get there!

It’s not easy to design for truth and usefulness. You need to go deep, be curious, be outside your own ego, and have a talent for connecting things. Most of all, you need to stay humble and create a business process and gateways to measure these all these perspectives. It seems that what we do know is that spending thousands of focused hours on something might eventually via emergence create meaningful art or innovations.

Alessi, the Italian home-furnishing design firm, developed a four-step relative matrix for evaluating their concepts on: function, sensation, communication, and price. No product can feel great unless it ticks all the boxes and do it in a fashion that’s coherent and relevant. Obviously, this is a hygiene factor to go ahead with the design, not a magic formula for what will become a success. After this initial go-ahead comes testing, showcasing, and iteration.

What we need to stop doing is hiding behind workshops with intellectual distance to the creative work. It is the playing, fiddling, and tinkering in a cross-functional group that does not pretend, but truly want to create, and not out of ego but out of humility and empathy to find truth and empathically usefulness.

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The future of creativity and innovation

We’re sorry to say, there is no magic one-size-fits-all process to creativity. Scientists understands very little on how creativity or even thoughts and emotions work in the human brain and body. Thus, we cannot clearly state how to train or perform creativity.

What can be said is that you cannot conduct research to find models and tools to become creative. What you need is instead humility, persistence, emergence, curiosity, and plenty of time on your hands. You need to debate and create friction rather than brainstorm and consensus - questioning what is true. You need to put deep ideas against and on top of each other, delve into whole attempts using patience, sweat, and tears.

By definition, you cannot be creative by copying someone else’s process. Instead, creativity is something that emerge from your brain, body, and nervous system. It needs to be true to you, and to the observing users. Even if there is no toolkit, there is an approach. In some of our coming articles we will follow up on the topic of innovation in relation to creativity and keep exploring potential business implications.

Don’t be afraid of AI and don’t blindly indulge in AI. Use it to your advantage, to rationalize, but not to replace human creativity.

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Is this the latest example of real creativity?

An example of something that’s not been creative for a long time is VR/AR. Throughout the last years we have seen countless of “new” initiatives within the area, but a complete lack of creativity. Each iteration has moved further from something that’s providing an added benefit.

Monday June 5th, Apple announced Vision Pro, and for the first time someone created something true and useful out of metaverse, without even mentioning the word. Apple did not only showcase a new product, but they showed us the importance of connecting people and of human interaction in harmony with technology. Instead of forcing you into their version reality, they welcome themselves into your reality.

How could it be any other way? Future will tell.

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f(x) is an editorial product combining data analytics and in-depth, curated opinion pieces that create applicable value and direction for growth.

By experts – for leaders.

This article was written by Marcus Braun and Oscar Olsson in close collaboration with Linus Hartin.

Supported by the Brand & Content team at frog: Johan Thuresson, Frida Cederg?rdh, Filip M?lberg, Desirée Ekberg, Erik Berggren, Hamza Tauqir, Jacob Westfeldt, Lauri Horelli, and Freja Liljedahl.

The header was designed by Desirée Ekberg using inspiration from assets at Freepik.com.

In-text illustrations were created or curated by Marcus Braun according to respective attribution.