When it comes to real business problems, can AI truly brainstorm effective solutions? While AI excels at handling data-intensive tasks, such as analysing trends, can AI generate genuinely innovative solutions to complex problems?
Why creativity matters
Creative problem-solving is crucial when adapting to unforeseen challenges and market changes. As the business landscape evolves, so does the nature of creativity, with AI now playing a significant role in driving innovation.
So creativity is a fundamental driver of innovation, whether it is the sudden spark of an idea during a quiet moment or the result of collaborative efforts within a team. In the era of rapid technological advancements and shifting global dynamics, it is no surprise that creativity has emerged as one of the most vital skills for both current and future workplaces. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report highlights that by 2027, the demand for creative thinking will see significant growth, becoming the top skill ahead of analytical thinking and technological literacy.
The rise of generative AI has sparked research in the field of creativity. Let’s explore the different types of creativity – individual, group, and AI-driven – and delve into the latest studies that reveal the effectiveness of hybrid creativity or AI-augmented problem-solving, where humans and AI collaborate for optimal results.
Solo creative problem-solving vs collaborative group work
Before we look at the research into AI-augmented creativity, let’s explore what we already know about creative activities performed alone or together in a group or team situation.
Individual creativity
We’ve all had those “aha” moments in the shower, while doing mundane tasks, or during a quiet walk in the park. Sometimes, creative ideas come to us right before sleep or as soon as we wake up. For many, generating ideas alone feels easier, there’s no time pressure or social expectation, and you can freely explore various techniques, such as mindfulness, to boost creative thinking.
Ideas generated in isolation often fall short in a business setting. Here’s why:
- Individual creativity is often shaped by personal perspectives and biases;
- While individual ideas might be novel, they aren’t always feasible or strong enough to thrive in a business context;
- Collaboration introduces diverse perspectives and iterative refinement, making the idea more resilient and practical;
- Even if you’re confident in your solo ideas, gaining the support of stakeholders and colleagues is essential.
Without group validation and feedback, facing objections or criticism on your own can quickly stifle your creative momentum and diminish your motivation to an idea. In contrast, ideas generated through team efforts have a greater chance of surviving, evolving, and transforming into successful business solutions.
Group creativity
While powerful and essential for collaborative innovation, group creativity comes with its own set of challenges and limitations. Here are some of the key problems associated with group creativity in a business context:
- It can also make it harder to reach a consensus due to the increased diversity of thinking;
- Differing opinions, priorities, and visions for the outcome slow down the decision-making process;
- Strong personalities may dominate discussions, overshadowing quieter but equally valuable voices, and limiting the diversity and range of ideas;
- ‘Groupthink’, where the desire for harmony and conformity within the group leads to poor decision-making, often results in safer, less controversial or innovative solutions, suppressing more creative or risky options.
- ‘Social loafing’, where some members assume others will carry the load, can the creation of ideas.
Despite the challenges of group work, people often feel more satisfied when collaborating, particularly during group brainstorming. For instance, individuals tend to believe they contributed more ideas to the group’s output than they actually did, they experience fewer cognitive failures and, as a result, a greater sense of achievement. This sense of inspiration within the team can often lead to ideas being developed into solutions, or what we call, ‘buy-in’.
With skilled facilitation and proper set-up, many of the typical barriers to group creativity can be overcome, fostering a more effective and productive environment with healthy debate (a little spice for your creative meal), risk-taking, openness and fun – something we explore in detail in our Co-creation, Ideation, and Innovation training.
Creativity + AI??
Many of us have already experimented with generating ideas using ChatGPT. For example, I was impressed at how quickly it came up with dozens of creative uses for a paper clip or how it drafted a poem for our office.
However, our goal is to explore how AI performs against human-generated solutions. Let’s explore three interesting academic studies that have delved into this very question.
Study 1: ‘The Crowdless Future? Generative AI and Creative Problem-Solving’
In a working paper published in Organization Science, Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Jacqueline Ng Lane and her team compared ChatGPT’s creative potential to crowdsourced innovations produced by people.
125 participants submitted business ideas for a sustainable circular economy. Each received $10 for each entry and $1,000 was awarded for the ‘best’ idea. At the same time, the team used Chat GPT to generate several hundred additional ideas. A panel of 300 external human evaluators, well-versed in the circular economy, assessed both human and AI-generated solutions based on uniqueness, environmental impact, profit potential, and feasibility.
While the human solutions displayed greater novelty, AI-generated ideas were rated as more practical and feasible. The most promising outcomes emerged from a hybrid approach, where humans refine AI-generated ideas, by inserting the perspective of specific industries, roles, or locations, and providing key scoring criteria.
Result: Blending human creativity with AI’s efficiency is key to maximising innovation, if:
- AI prompts are carefully and appropriately crafted.
- AI can support innovation and ideation in a variety of ways, as an idea generator, or to refine existing concepts.
- Generative AI is best used as a collaborative tool, as it tends to create incremental solutions on its own.
Study 2: ‘Artificial Intelligence-Augmented Brainstorming: How Humans and AI Beat Humans Alone’
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379559401_Artificial_Intelligence-Augmented_Brainstorming_How_Humans_and_Ai_Beat_Humans_Alone
In another study, Sebastian Bouschery, Vera Blazevic and Frank T Piller from RWTH Aachen University in the Netherlands explored whether hybrid creativity – the collaboration between humans and AI – could outperform traditional brainstorming approaches.
Researchers conducted a lab experiment with 168 participants, who were asked to generate ideas for a common brainstorming problem in one of three randomly assigned conditions:
- Interactive groups (brainstorming in groups of four),
- Nominal groups (working alone),
- Hybrid groups (working alone but collaborating with ChatGPT-3 to generate ideas).
For comparison, ChatGPT-3 also generated ideas on its own.
Result: For both productivity and creativity scales, humans working alone with AI generated more creative ideas than humans working alone or with other humans. The researchers suggest that the success of hybrid working by solo individuals with AI is that it combines the best of both worlds, including:
- AI can stimulate cognitive processes and help individuals overcome production blocks that often arise in group brainstorming.
- Unlike human group members, AI does not judge or inhibit ideas through social pressure, allowing the brainstorming process to be more fluid and productive.
On its own, however, AI struggled to produce valuable ideas, becoming repetitive quite quickly.
This study also examined the social and emotional benefits for participants of co-creating with others in groups, as many reported higher levels of enjoyment when interacting with people rather than AI. AI-augmented brainstorming mitigates the productivity losses typically seen in human-only groups, fosters greater creativity, and can enhance innovation. However, exploring this human-AI dynamic in more complex team settings, such as where individuals first interact with AI before collaborating as a group, could offer deeper insights into how AI can best augment human creativity.
Study 3: ‘Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content’
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn5290
A recent study by researchers Anil Doshi from University College London and Oliver Hauser from the University of Exeter, published in Science Advances, explores the impact of generative AI on individual and collective creativity.
293 participants were asked to write a short, eight-sentence story that is “appropriate for a teenage and young adult audience”. Then participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions:
- Human-only – participants wrote stories without any AI assistance.
- Human with one GenAI idea condition – participants were allowed to call upon a generative AI platform (OpenAI’s GPT-4) to provide a three-sentence starting idea to inspire their story writing.
- Human with five GenAI ideas – participants could choose to receive up to five generative AI ideas, each providing a possibly different inspiration for their story.
The stories were rated by a team of 600 evaluators who cycled through each of their randomly assigned stories three times assessing:
- creativity and emotional characteristics
- likelihood the story was written by an AI versus a human
- (when the AI contribution was revealed) general responses and views of generative AI
Result: Participants were assessed for baseline creativity prior to the task using a standard metric and the results showed clear benefits in creativity for those who had lower scores. AI assistance significantly improved their creativity, quality, and readers’ enjoyment of their stories. The more AI-generated ideas they received, the higher the creative output.
For individuals who began the experiment with high creativity scores, AI assistance offered little to no benefit, and in some cases, even had a slight negative impact on their creative performance.
AI-boosted creativity came at a cost; generative AI-enabled stories were more similar to each other than stories written by humans alone. These results point to an increase in individual creativity at the risk of losing collective novelty.
What can we conclude?
A consistent theme emerges across the three studies:
- AI has significant potential to enhance individual creativity and problem-solving;
- AI is most effectively used in collaboration with human creativity rather than as a standalone tool;
- AI-boosted creative outputs become more similar over time.
In two out of three studies, hybrid creativity – where humans and AI work together – produces the best results. AI helped those participants to overcome both individual and group limitations. AI assistance has a clear benefit for individuals with lower initial creativity levels, but for those who are already highly creative, AI offers little to no advantage and can even detract from performance.
While AI can enhance individual creative output, it risks reducing diversity in creative work when used extensively, often resulting in similar ideas or content. Adding to this concern, a recent study published in Nature, titled ‘AI Models Collapse When Trained on Recursively Generated Data’, highlights the long-term risks of generative AI use. Self-taught AI leads to nonsensical unreliable outputs after just a few cycles and ‘hallucinations’ – where AI generates false or misleading information.
So the use of generative AI must be carefully balanced. Organisations and individuals should be mindful of the risks of over-reliance, particularly the potential reduction in diversity and novelty, as well as the long-term degradation of AI models when trained on their own content.
Ideation occurs within a specific context and relies on existing knowledge and situational understanding, which only humans can provide. Creative ideas are not the final product; they must still be evaluated, refined, and implemented to generate value. These studies also showed that humans find social interaction during collaborative activities more enjoyable than solely interacting with AI, and this is a key aspect of creative work and group activity.
Based on the research, and despite the excitement around AI’s creative potential, human-to-human collaboration, with AI as an assistive tool, should remain a priority.
Interested to learn more?
Join our Co-creation, Ideation, and Innovation course, where we train group facilitation to bring out the best ideas, set up the right environment for enjoyable creative processes, and discuss the co-creative potential of AI.
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