Creativity in the Age of AI | Jerry Wind

Can AI Help Enhance Our Creativity?

Dan Loney: One of the important questions being asked right now as artificial intelligence becomes more and more a factor in our lives is, what happens to creativity? Creativity is an incredible component for both business and personal success of so many. But will it be challenged as AI does more for us, and how do we still develop and use creativity to our benefit?

Pleasure to be joined here in studio by Jerry Wind, who is the Lauder professor emeritus and professor of marketing here at the Wharton School. He's also co-author of a new book on the topic coming out this month. It is titled Creativity in the Age of AI: Toolkits for the Modern Mind. Jerry, it seems like what happens to creativity becomes a very important question as we go deeper and deeper in having AI in our lives.

Jerry Wind: Absolutely. And if you reflect on this, creativity has always been absolutely critical for any progress. It's the core of any innovation, whether we're dealing at the individual level, the organizational level, businesses or even societies. So creativity is more important than ever, and AI is a huge opportunity to enhance our creativity.

Loney: How so?

Wind: My general belief, and the premise of my book as well as my Coursera course on creativity, is that every individual can enhance their creativity. Creativity is not that a few of us were born with this, and others not. If you are the genius of Mozart, Beethoven, and others, you don't have to worry about the course or the book. Just continue doing what you're doing. But the rest of us, every one of us can enhance their creativity if they use the right approaches. Both the course and the book are trying to highlight those various approaches, and each one of them can be turbocharged by AI.

Loney: It seems like the theory — at least by some out there — is that creativity could be cut back because people will rely on AI more, and they won't move forward and use the tools that they have to be more creative. How do you respond to that?

Wind: Unfortunately for these individuals, they'll be left behind. But everyone else should really look at AI as an enormous tool. It's like a personal assistant that you have available to you, 24/7, in any language, that can help you. If you use it appropriately, and you probe and interact with this like with a live research assistant, you will get huge benefit in enhancing your creativity.

Loney: When you're talking about somebody's professional life, how can they go about making sure that creativity remains?

Wind: In thinking about this, it's actually related to the work we know in neuroscience now. It's like a muscle, and you have to develop it. You have to use it. What we're saying and suggesting primarily, both in the course and the book, is that there are approaches that will help you do it. The fundamental of every approach to creativity is challenging the current status quo, challenging your current mental model. Challenge it by knowing that, are we doing the best, or can we do better? By the mere fact that you start challenging the status quo, you're then exploring whole new opportunities. We provide a set of approaches that people can use, and AI will help them in magnifying and amplifying the approach they're using.

Loney: We talk about this in the scope of the individual, but you also have to think about it in the scope of the business. Do firms do enough to kind of push creativity forward within their employees?

Wind: Some do and most don't. Unfortunately, too many firms are sticking with the status quo. Too many firms are afraid of taking the needed risk to change from what they're doing. Yet the enormous changes in the environment, in everything around us — in the geopolitical environment, in the economy, in consumer preferences, in technology and in the huge speed in technology — just think about how fast the technological developments are, especially with AI. If you are not addressing it, if you’re not challenging what you're currently doing, you'll be behind. Because no approach that worked for you yesterday is guaranteed to work tomorrow, which means that you have to explore other approaches. And that's what we're trying to do.

Loney: You list a variety of different approaches in the book. Give us a couple of examples.

Wind: The fundamental one is, challenge the status quo, and there are a whole set of approaches for doing it. Another very powerful approach is following the different trends in society, whether changes in consumer behavior — the fact that consumers now are always on. What are the implications? Follow the technological changes. Follow the geopolitical changes. There are specific tools like morphological analysis that allow you to structure a possible solution into components and generate many elements for each one of the categories of solution, or the attributes you're dealing with. It's a systematic way that helps you generate more ideas, and then you can evaluate them.

In the book and the course, we focus on 12 different sets of approaches. There are many others. Some of them are old approaches, like the “six hats of the de Bono” that suggest that you use different approaches, different perspectives, whether you're using interdisciplinary perspective, whether you’re using open innovation, which is enormously powerful. There are studies now suggesting that open innovation can multiply the speed of coming up with effective solutions by four to five times, and the cost by eight to 10 times, compared to doing everything internally. There's a whole set of approaches that individuals and organizations can use to try to enhance their creativity, and so also societies.

Why Creativity Is Essential to Success

Loney: You mention also in the book that there are ways people can learn from other creative people, like musicians, artists, Nobel Prize winners. Make that correlation for us, please.

Wind: Creativity is in all disciplines, in all areas. The strengths and the uniqueness of the Coursera course I have on creativity is that after the first few chapters where we discussed the 12 different approaches, I have 60 very creative people from many disciplines who are giving examples of how creativity changed their life and their organizations, and how they used it. We have examples from music, dance, art, ballet, opera. We have examples from design and architecture. We have examples from gaming, advertising, and marketing. We have examples from science, medicine and technology and engineering. We have examples from entrepreneurs and businesses. The idea is people can learn from all these different examples. Interdisciplinary perspective for innovation and creativity is absolutely a must.

Loney: Is there a link between having a creative mindset and having that level of success in your personal and professional life? And being able to overcome some of the roadblocks that may be there personally or professionally?

Wind: Absolutely. Absolutely. If you look at all the things that change our lives, almost in any area, they're all a result of breakthrough innovations that required creative thinking and challenging the established status quo. Think about basic things such as electric cars. Think about Uber, think about Airbnb. [They are] innovations that primarily challenged the status quo in a given industry and changed it completely, and changed our life.

Loney: What are some of the things that people should think about having in their toolkit to spur creativity?

Wind: The two critical area are the first and the 12th, the last one. The first one is, challenge the status quo. Challenge your mental models. The last one, have the courage to change and be persistent in what you're doing. And what you're doing in between, there are all other approaches that you can use. You can select from them. There are other approaches that probably you can discover by looking at what other companies are doing, and you can select these approaches.

My call for everyone is, start experimenting with them. Don't just listen to them. Nod your head and say, “Interesting.” Select the one that appeals to you and experiment with them. Try it. Try to what extent any of these approaches can help address your personal, organizational or society's challenges.

Loney: You may have some things that work for one person and not for another.

Wind: Right. And people have individual preferences. They may feel more comfortable with one approach versus another. There's no one best approach that everyone can use. The principle that everyone should think about is, how do I challenge the current status quo in my mental model of what I'm doing today? Two is, how do I select new strategic options to address my challenges? There are many, many approaches for this, for identifying them. And the third is, whatever you select, go and experiment with it. You actually have to experiment to identify to what extent the approach you select helps you address your personal, organizational, and society's challenge.

AI Won’t Be the Be-All-End-All

Loney: I would assume that as we continue to move down this AI highway, this topic of creativity continues to be right at the forefront of a lot of discussions because of how valuable it can be.

Wind: Right, and because AI can actually help you if you use it correctly. AI is not going to give you the solution, but AI has going to give you other ideas to explore. It will expand the range of options you have. Keep in mind that the differentiation today is not by improving the accuracy and rigor of our evaluation of options. But if all the options are lousy, the differentiation will be if you could generate more creative and different and effective options.

Loney: It takes us back to what some people think of AI: It will be something that will benefit the personal decision. It won't be the be-all-end-all, but it will be a way to guide you on that path.

Wind: Right. And will do it much more efficiently. You can do it by far faster using AI in almost in any one of the approaches we suggest in the book and the course. So, use AI. Experiment with this. There are many AI platforms, so use more than one. There are many ways with each one of the platforms, whether using ChatGPT or Claude or any of the others. Experiment with different ways of approaching and interacting with it.

Loney: How will that component play in? Because that's something I think not many people are talking about. Depending on the AI platform, you may have a nuanced difference in the response or the information, and that would impact that decision around being creative.

Wind: Primarily, if you look at them as alternative ways of generating ideas. In the book, we're actually showing some examples of the same problem that we’re giving to multiple platforms, and we're getting to what extent additional insight by going to more than one platform. But it's up to you, the individual, how to make sense of this. How do you evaluate it? Again, you could use AI to try to help the evaluation, but you eventually have to make the decision. AI really should be viewed as human-centered AI, as your assistant, helping you make better decisions, not the decision-maker.