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In today’s world, technology and artificial intelligence (AI) are booming. This raises many questions about the impact it will have on our lives. The emergence of generative AI has raised one of the major questions: what impact will it have on the future of human creativity? Will we be replaced by machines? Before answering that question, let’s try to understand what creativity is and where it comes from.
Creativity is an essential part of everyday life. We are bound to explore, dig and uncover all the ways in which we can provide answers to the questions we ask ourselves and solve new problems. Without creativity, we can only endlessly reproduce what has already been done. I find this topic very interesting to study because of its complexity but also because of what is at stake. More broadly, the ability to be creative has helped civilizations to evolve considerably, enabling them to think outside the box through innovation. Creativity is part of our daily lives and helps to improve and amaze us. Yet it has only really been studied since the 1950s. Thanks to creativity, we are able to find original and innovative solutions to new situations. The concept of creativity in everyday life only emerged in the 1940s. Before that, the term used was serendipity. The term was suggested by Horace Walpole in a letter to a friend in 1754. The idea came from a book he had read as a child, The Three Princes of Serendip. He defined serendipity as the ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated events, an essential precursor to creativity. In the field of scientific research, many advances have been attributed to serendipity, one of the most famous being that of Alexander Flemming, who found a forgotten petri dish and noticed that a fungus had grown in it, but no bacteria had developed. It was then that he made the connection: the fungus had prevented bacteria from growing in the culture, and penicillin was discovered!
As with any concept, there are several definitions that reflect the evolution of its collective representation. Creativity was first defined as the ability to produce something original, then in 1962 Mednick introduced the notion of utility. For him, creativity has meaning only if it is useful to the goal we have set for ourselves. From there, in 1996, Stenberg & Lubart came up with a widely accepted definition: ‘Creativity is when we produce something that is both original and adapted to a task’. This ability is based on the following 4 aspects: fluency, i.e. the number of answers given by the participant for a given task; flexibility, i.e. the number of semantic categories explored by the participant through all of his or her answers; the originality of each of the answers compared to all of the answers given by all of the participants tested; and finally, the elaboration of each of the subject’s answers, which reveals the result of the idea addressed, in particular by adding details that are not necessary for understanding the basic idea. Theories of the cognitive mechanisms behind creativity highlight the involvement of semantic, attentional, inhibitory, mental flexibility and persistence processes (De Dreu et al., 2008; Martindale, 2007; Mednick, 1962; Mendelsohn, 1976). We know that certain cognitive processes, such as working memory and mental imagery, are important for the expression of creativity, while others, such as analytical thinking, are limiting. We do not know to what extent the latter have a negative impact on creativity and how they interact with the processes that promote it. At the brain level, numerous studies have shown an association between creativity and brain volume in specific regions (Arkin et al., 2019; Jauk et al., 2015) and changes in resting-state functional connectivity in participants who were more creative (Beaty et al., 2014). All these results seem to suggest that we’re all born with an innate predisposition to creativity! But don’t worry, it’s something we can actively train. So, if you’re curious to learn more, I’m thrilled to share my two articles with you. One looks at the differences between people who are less creative and those who are more (Deshayes & al 2021), and the other is all about creativity training (Alescio-Lautier et al., 2023).
Now we know what creativity is, we can try to answer our question: how the emergence of generative AI will impact our creative abilities. A recent study by Bangerl and al., 2024 compared the performance of humans and generative AI on a verbal creativity test. The results of the study show that humans excel in the originality and flexibility of their responses, while AI performs better in the elaboration and detail of responses. This is confirmed by other studies that show the complementary role of human and AI operators, who perform better than either humans or AI alone (Boussioux & al., 2024). After all, human creativity, enriched by technological advances, can open up new and promising perspectives. By combining our creative abilities with the potential of AI, we can hope to solve complex problems and innovate even more effectively. The key lies in the balance and complementarity between human and machine, for a future in which creativity continues to play a central role in our evolution. It is therefore a collective and scientific responsibility to ensure that these AIs remain what they are, i.e. tools to improve our daily lives.