An empirical investigation of the impact of ChatGPT on creativity
This study delves into the potential of ChatGPT for enhancing human creativity in problem-solving. Through a series of five experiments, participants were tasked with using ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) to come up with creative solutions for various everyday and innovation-centric challenges. These challenges ranged from selecting a unique gift for a teenager to crafting a toy, repurposing underutilized items, and designing an innovative dining table.
The results revealed that leveraging ChatGPT led to a notable boost in the creativity of the ideas generated compared to scenarios where no technological aid was used or a conventional web search engine like Google was employed. This positive impact was consistent across different types of problems, whether they involved navigating numerous or limited constraints, or were perceived as necessitating empathetic considerations.
Key Findings:
- ChatGPT excelled in generating ideas that were incrementally novel rather than radically different from existing concepts.
- Process evidence indicated that ChatGPT's ability to amalgamate distantly related concepts into a coherent narrative played a pivotal role in enhancing idea articulation.
For those interested in delving deeper, all data, including the secondary datasets and experimental details, are openly accessible on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/rzn87/.
References:
- Hu, K. ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base—analyst note. Reuters (3 February 2023); Link
- Tong, A. Exclusive: ChatGPT traffic slips again for the third month in a row. Reuters (7 September 2023); Link
- Kung, T. H. et al. Performance of ChatGPT on USMLE: potential for AI-assisted medical education using large language models. PLoS Digit. Health 2, e0000198 (2023); Article
