Tech as Cognitive Fertility Treatment: Can AI be our “Creative Viagra”?

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• People have high expectations around AI becoming a new creative "superdrug" but most AI applications are currently quite bland and unoriginal 
• Our obsession with productivity may be to blame which is why we need to start using AI more creatively and interactively 

The recent disruptive developments in the area of artificial intelligence and the resulting wave of new AI-powered tools and applications 🤖 has led to greatly exaggerated expectations around AI becoming a new creative “superdrug”, not just capable of stimulating our creative productivity, but maybe even able to inspire completely new ways of creative thinking and problem solving. In some cases it is even suggested that we need to completely rethink the way we conceptualise creativity in the first place.    

In light of these high hopes and expectations it is even more surprising how bland and unoriginal most AI applications come across, despite the increasing technical “firepower” each iteration of LLM seems to throw behind these applications.

Without trying to comment on what might be the actual underlying reason why people would think they need an AI powered app to plan their couple’s vacation, I will just quietly move on and focus on the bigger question of why most people apparently ever only seem to use AI in creatively shallow applications.

One of the obvious reasons might be that the applications we are looking for seem to be mostly about productivity and not so much about creativity of our output. Of course, people familiar with the equal odds rule might (statistically) rightly point to the relatedness of the two. However, relatively recent research has clearly shown that inter-individual differences, specifically with regard to openness, clearly moderates the relationship between productivity and creativity.

It could hence well be that it is ultimately down to our unhealthy obsession with productivity, that we are so easy to fall for the type of (AI) tools which are basically just a technically updated version of Excel’s very first version of “auto-fill”. Now, if you watch both Microsoft’s Office365-AI as well as Google’s Workspace-AI intro videos closely, you are immediately able to pick up on the underlying “productivity boost” claim, in fact Microsoft is even calling their new AI-powered Office solution with limited modesty “The most powerful productivity tool on the planet”...

And they are probably not wrong given that first research has clearly shown productivity gains through similar “AI co-pilot” approaches, for example in coding. But then again, who wants to play only at the level of productivity gains without asking the question of what problem we should actually focus on solving in the first place? It appears that in simply boosting our collective productivity, these AI tools - or better, our productivity-centred way of using these tools - might simply lead to a “more of the same, but on steroids”, and ultimately to an even further increase of the highly critical type of “business as usual” which has led us into the most precarious poly-crisis in human history in the first place.

Given the general promise and vast technological potential of AI, this begs the question of whether the right way of using it would not necessarily have to start with us and our very own human skills and needs, rather than just building and blindly using tools which are at worst even accelerating an unhealthy and unsustainable economic model. However, this requires us asking and answering some painful questions, starting with the question of how we want to define ourselves as human beings in the “Age of AI”, whether we simply want to submit to the new paradigms of a solely technologically driven Epistemic AI-Economy, or whether we have the courage to re-define us as the highly ecologically dependant, emotionally fallible and socially interconnected beings we are - because we might be better at being human than machines, but that certainly “doesn’t mean it’s easy”...

But if confronting us with our own fragile and fallible identity is so hard, why should we do it in the first place and not just simply “ride the wave” of technological progress to see where it might lead us? Also, isn’t there not always a technological solution to any problem at the end, so why bother with difficult questions about ourselves? A good and honest response to these questions has recently been given by James Bridle, who said in The Guardian:

The lesson of the current wave of “artificial” “intelligence”, I feel, is that intelligence is a poor thing when it is imagined by corporations. If your view of the world is one in which profit maximisation is the king of virtues, and all things shall be held to the standard of shareholder value, then of course your artistic, imaginative, aesthetic and emotional expressions will be woefully impoverished. We deserve better from the tools we use, the media we consume and the communities we live within, and we will only get what we deserve when we are capable of participating in them fully. 

And it is in the very last sentence of this quote, where we actually also find the solution of how to render our relationship with artificial intelligence somewhat more fulfilling, namely when we actively and creatively start to interact with them.

But where does the required creativity come from? Well, cognitively speaking, it “simply” comes from the brain actively creating novel and original connections between remote and otherwise unrelated topics or, more precisely, knowledge areas of interest, which are represented in our brains through repeated interactions - accumulated experiences - with the world.

And it is also here precisely, where we are starting to see the inverse relationship between conflicting goals like productivity and creativity: The more we set ourselves up on a path towards ever increasing efficiency, the less time we will have to actually do put in the work to create that “useless knowledge”, which, under the right circumstances, our creative brain  happens to suddenly be able to transform into something uniquely useful and beautiful. 

But what are those circumstances, and how can we avoid falling for the “efficiency trap” in the first place? Luckily, quite a few eminently creative people have given us quite detailed descriptions of how and when they managed to tap into their creative talent. And one of the most profound and also most inspiring well-spring of creativity is right under our eyes: Nature itself! And we do not even have to teach or train ourselves in order to feel her inspiration, because as evolved beings we all naturally possess “an innate tendency to seek connections with nature and other forms of life”. Because ultimately, we depend on nature, not just physically but also “aesthetically, intellectually, and cognitively”. It is hence unsurprising that some of the most surprising cases of human ingenuity and innovation are ultimately inspired by nature and her incredible beauty.

This means that we generally do not lack the cognitive prerequisites to come up with more creative applications of AI, but we actively need to use our naturally given curiosity and sense of awe in order to closely watch and learn from the greatest teacher of all, mother nature. And in this process it actually helps to develop a certain kind of healthy obsession and attention to detail. Especially when it comes to developing knowledge, skill sets, and ultimately identities across many different disciplines and domains. Because people with these more pronounced identities have been shown to „consistently display higher levels of creativity“. This even applies to linguistic identity, where multilingualism has been successfully linked to increased cognitive flexibility as an important prerequisite for creativity. So to sum up, we can see that creativity, much like having an identity, is a basic human necessity. 

In light of this, our original fertility metaphor for creativity might actually have not been too far off when it comes to AI‘s role for creativity: Generative AI might “generally” increase likelihood of creative productivity, i.e. act like a cognitive version of viagra, but without the underlying cognitive preparations and ensuing features, enabling actual creativity to happen, it will surely not be able to increase the likelihood of any qualitatively creative outcome, i.e. it will not be able act like a cognitive fertility treatment but will leave those efficiency-driven AI-users cognitively “sterile”.

But where does this leave us practically, what has really changed through the most recent advances in AI? Well, like in the age old vision of a “global brain”, actually we are now suddenly able to digitally remap the sumtotal of all existing world knowledge under new and technically advanced principles of maximal epistemic fungibility. This is effectively creating completely new relationships with our self (person), with ourselves (people) as well as with nature (planet), clearly demostrating the relational nature of knowledge in the first place. And accidentally, this is also considered to be Turing’s greatest achievement, namely “seeing digital computers as a mirror by which the human mind could consider itself in ways that previously were not possible”.

And, almost by accident, a new opportunity emerged during this remapping process: The opportunity to dynamically restructure all of our knowledge, prioritising not so much static knowledge hierarchies, but  focusing instead on the fully flexible epistemology of dynamically discoverable information entities. This in turn has unlocked a completely new type of agency and liveliness in the way we can interact both with individual pieces of information as well as with knowledge systems at large. Which in turn has opened up a unique new opportunity to actively listen to and learn from epistemic entities based on their relative level of liveliness. And as this coincidentally happens to represent nature’s most essential principle of life, we can effectively apply it as a structuring principle and relevant signal within the type of natural systems of knowledge which in turn can again fuel our creativity… #circularepistemology

Ultimately, this means that any single, truly original, and as of its „liveliness“, extraordinarily creative idea, does actually hold the potential to completely restructure and transcend the world’s full body of knowledge, representing an entirely new type of „disruptive innovation“ potential. On the other hand, it will also be our responsibility to find such a disruptively creative idea as “affinity for life is now a choice we must [actively] make” in order to ensure our survival on this planet.  

AI can imagine everything, although what it imagines means nothing. We however, have lost the ability to imagine anything*. And unfortunately, because our future depends on it, what we imagine means everything… #ImaginationGap 

* outside the well-trodden path of obvious, mainstream ideas that is of course.

So, whilst we have been frantically, yet rather erratically, prompting AI, it appears that AI is now implicitly prompting us back, namely to catch up with our uniquely human responsibility to imagine the type of future we want to co-develop with our newly found artificial partner. Or like Richard Moss writes: “Ultimately, moving from an attempt at thinking machines to an attempt at creative machines may transform our understanding of ourselves”...

„We have to get better at imagining the future, as the only future we can make is one that we are able to imagine.“ -Rohit Bhargava, at SXSW23… 

I would maybe suggest a slightly more concrete version: “We have to get better at imagining a better, healthier and more sustainable future for everyone, as we can only make such a future when we are able to imagine it”