ChatGPT as an Anti-Thesaurus

Can AI be useful for telling us how not to be creative? Waterstons Innovation: The Dots #17

This is Brainsley, a very creative Brain.

It is widely accepted that AI can be used to generate drafts. This might be emails, or documents, or articles. What unites these are they tend to be based on facts, and they are quite “literal”, without needing much interpretation. You prompt the machine with the exact thing you want, and you hope it creates that. In a sense, the “art” it creates is the same - it's very literal and exact. You ask for a picture of a dog, and it gives you a dog. It gives you exactly what you are looking for. It’s never something new, it’s always a variant of something old.

So, how can you use this to be creative? To do something new? Is there a way to use this inherent boringness to create something exciting?

You use a thesaurus to expand your writing, and to find new ways to say things. Maybe we can use ChatGPT as the opposite, a tool to tell us what not to write.

What is this? This is The Dots, our newsletter about exciting things we find in the world of innovation. We imagine innovation as connecting the dots; putting together a jigsaw. Our puzzle pieces are the pieces of interesting information we absorb in the world, our partners and their products. Innovation happens when we connect these pieces in new and interesting ways. This newsletter is about these dots we find and connect.

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ChatGPT, Creativity, and Farting About

Technical text can be quite different to creative text. An aim of technical text is to represent the truth and the situation as it currently is. Think about legal documentation, code, or summarising an email. We want it to be exact, to not interpret our prompt in a strange way. We want predictableness.

Really, original thought is the last thing you want in an AI (most of the time). If you ask it to write an email to your boss, you want it to create something sensible and tested. The fact it has all of the text written in human history is a positive here - we want to learn from before, repeat what has worked, and not stray too far from what is expected.

If you have a chatbot interacting with clients and customers, creativity is an enormous liability. Original thought, and an ability to go off-script, need to be contained. You need to have this robot talk to your customers in a very prescribed way and only talk about a very select number of topics in a very select tone.

This is what AI can be good at. I’m not saying it is perfect, or it’s never wrong - instead, I’m saying it is good at taking things it has seen before and creating a variant of it. Do you want a picture of an ice cream can in Antarctica? Great, it can do that! What it is not good at is going into the unknown and making something entirely new. It can only give you versions of things that have come before it.

Brains on the Outside

Alex and I (Andrew!), outside of work, run a podcast called Brains on the Outside. We aspire for it to be creative and funny - and I think most of the time we hit that mark. Something it has taught me is that being creative requires time and requires you to set aside space for you to sit and think. Like panning through the rocks to get to the gold, you need to sift through a lot of bad ideas to get to a good one.

Brains on the Outside (or BotO, as we lovingly refer to it) is about solving business problems in ridiculous and silly ways. Each week we get a problem from a real business, and we each pitch an odd way to solve it. It’s fun, it’s wholesome. I read a lot about how AI can replace creative tasks (like the studios who want to replace writers with AI), but I strongly think that isn’t possible.

On the face of it, if you accept AI as a creative tool, BotO should be very automatable. We receive a prompt every week, and then we give some responses.

Here is an example of a question we got from Allbirds, the shoe manufacturer:

How do we make sustainability sexy again? ie, most people would obviously say they prefer to buy something sustainable, but when it comes to it… they are a lot of competing factors

the mv5 is a big upgrade from a Snowball

The Anti-Thesaurus

Let’s investigate what ChatGPT comes up with then from our Allbirds prompt. I plugged the question into ChatGPT and these are the bullet point headlines I got out:

1. Interactive Workshop

2. Gamification and Rewards

3. Visual Storytelling Campaign

4. Augmented Reality (AR) Experiences

5. Community Eco-Challenges

They aren’t bad, per se. In the right hands, they may even be good. But they aren’t particularly original. They are rehashes of other ideas. I redacted some of the text, for the sake of space on this page, but after each bullet point came a few sentences going more in-depth. However, these are incredibly vague - for “Visual Storytelling Campaign”, the advice I was given was “Develop a visually appealing and emotionally compelling campaign”. That’s not super actionable. In fact, it’s a fairly lazy suggestion, leaving me with all the work of figuring out the campaign to me.

I went back and reworded the question, I asked it to be “more creative”. Unimpressed with the results, I even asked it to be “way more creative”. However, you start to notice that it feels like it has a pool of 10 “creative” ideas it can pull from - it loves AR and VR, it wants to run a storytelling campaign, and just like the rest of us, it really wants us to use AI. But that's what these models do - try to find the most likely next word. What else can it give you, apart from the average of everyone else?

If anything, it’s just given me a list of things everyone wants to do, or things it has deemed popular. It has given me a list of things to avoid if I want to be creative, an Anti-Thesaurus.

So?

Maybe you could say “well, who cares, at least you have ideas now, it’s a starting point.” However, they aren’t very inspiring ideas, and they aren’t that original. You could use it as a way of avoiding generic ideas, opposite-thesaurus. However, in think-pieces, LinkedIn, and Twitter, AI is being held up as a way to automate creativity. It may be able to generate a tweet based on your recent most popular tweets, marketing imagery based on previous campaigns, or a really realistic image of the Mona Lisa holding a sandwich, but something totally new is different.

Being creative, with the goal of creating something unique, is a process and skipping the first step in that may not be the benefit many think it is. Creating the crap for yourself is the first step in making something great.

John Swartzwelder, a writer for The Simpsons told The New Yorker:

Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue — “Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I won’t do it.” Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it.

It’s rough, but I’m not sure you can ever skip that first stage of generating the bad ideas - you have to do it sometime.

In our Innovation Workshops, we play a game called Crazy 8s - we make someone generate 8 ideas in 8 mins. We don’t expect them all to be winners, but you need to give someone space to generate a lot of ideas to up the likelihood of creating a good one.

Then, we don’t only make 1 person do it, the whole group has to. Then, from the dozens or hundreds of ideas we have, we can begin to find the gold. ChatGPT would not have helped here, as no one would have had the chance to enter a space to create their own good ideas. The brainwork required to make a good episode of The Simpsons requires you to have written the bad draft of The Simpsons first.

Farting About

The journey to making something creative is part of the point. However, the obsession tech has with finding things to automate goes against this idea.

For a second, let’s take a look at a different industry. A popular idea is automating writing all the “easy” code that junior software developers write. However, if you were to do this what would this leave junior software developers with to do? Then, if we no longer need any junior devs, where are the seniors going to come from? The same thing holds here: if we automate the creation of all the “bad” creative ideas (the ones we need to think of to come up with the good ones) how will people learn how to write good ones?

AI and computing, ideally, were meant to automate away the boring parts of work. However, it’s being aimed at the fun parts, the creative parts, and the parts that allow us to make new things. Importantly, it misses the point that being creative can just be a fun thing to do, so why do we want to remove that?

I propose that ChatGPT could be used as an Anti-Thesaurus - as a way of expanding your creative process. You take its outputs and use it as your own prompt, as something not to do, as an idea to ignore. Something to make sure your idea is absolutely unique. It can provide an interesting constraint: “how can I help Allbirds be more sustainable if I’m not allowed to use anything ChatGPT has said?”. This will almost certainly elongate the time it takes - but the journey to create something is part of it.

Farting about is the point.

[When Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know.

The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore. - Kurt Vonnegut

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