The Creativity Triad in Times of Artificial Intelligence

In times of artificial intelligence, it has never been more important to develop human creativity.

Not just to stand out professionally, but also to make the best possible use of these agents that are transforming the way we live and work.

Drawing from my previous studies on innovation, and reflecting on the scenario that includes generative artificial intelligence, I propose that exercising creativity as a lifestyle should be supported by three pillars:

1. Repertoire

2. Connections

3. Intentionality

I'll explain each point to make it clearer.

1. Repertoire

To understand why we need to have a broad and varied repertoire, we first need to understand how ideas are born. For this, we have neuroscience to help us.

The so-called predictive categorization

Neuroscientists agree that our brain is the organ in the human body that consumes the most energy. The fact is that, even if we spend the entire day lying down without moving, the energy consumption remains the same.

According to neuroscientist Gregory Berns, the brain has a fixed consumption (about 20% of everything the human body requires) and needs to be nourished always. That's why a person in a coma, who can't move a muscle, still needs to be fed.

According to Professor Berns:

"The brain is basically a lazy piece of meat. It doesn't like to spend energy."

For survival reasons, our central processor had to figure out a way to be less wasteful and came up with some tricks to make it more efficient. Moreover, processing has to be very fast, because our survival depends on us instantly discerning whether that shape coming toward us is a hungry panther or just a dog wanting to be friends.

So it has to be fast and work properly; efficiency and agility are the keys. The best way is to use information that's already stored (previous experiences) to make sense of what you're seeing.

It works more or less like this: our senses (eyes, ears, tongue, skin, nose, vestibular system) capture information from the environment and send it to the brain. All of this needs to be processed and understood, all the time. And processing work spends a lot of time and energy.

One of the most used shortcuts by the brain is using a scheme called predictive categorization.

This means that, instead of processing complete and detailed information every time you come into contact with some type of stimulus, the brain compares a sample with its "internal database," which is, its repertoire. It looks for patterns to optimize this comparison.

Once it has found something similar, it starts ignoring the rest and reusing what it already has within the repertoire. This way processing becomes faster, more agile and efficient. There's no need to analyze everything every time; just search for patterns.

Let's use an example to make it clearer: imagine you're eating chocolate. You've eaten chocolate many, many times in your life; you already know the appearance, smell, taste, and texture. So when your brain looks at a chocolate bar, it just takes the visual record of a piece and throws away the rest of the information.

Once it identifies that it's chocolate, it doesn't process anything else. It goes to previous memories and searches for the smell, taste, and texture. Unless there's something very discordant (for example, the taste buds register that it's much sweeter compared to previous cases), it practically does no processing work. It just took a little piece and went to the "chocolate shelf" inside the brain to retrieve the records.

In summary, predictive categorization makes you take only a sample of the information and infer the rest, based on your personal experiences. Yes, it's what you're thinking: predictive categorization is nothing more than a fancy name for prejudice.

But don't curse the poor brain because of this. Thinking uses a lot of energy. Remember when you were beginning to learn to drive; it even gave you a headache, right? You'd come home tired, as if you'd been beaten up. It's like when we go to the gym for the first time after a long time. Everything hurts.

With the brain it's the same. We're dead tired. It would be unsustainable to continue feeling this every time a person went driving. That's why this reuse of information is so necessary, a kind of automatic mode.

Using predictive categorization to save energy works very well in day-to-day life (in fact, it's very necessary), but it destroys, without mercy, all our imagination, culture, and creative capacity. Moreover, by stimulating our senses with things our brain already knows, we make it stay comfortable, without making any effort and also not learning anything.

Building shelves and drawers

The problem is that only working in automatic mode, without much effort, is like our brain being thrown on the couch all day binge-watching series and eating junk food. To have innovative ideas, the brain needs to have an athlete's muscles, be healthy and in excellent physical shape. If I need to generate many ideas, that is, run a marathon, and my brain is all flabby, lazy, without any conditioning, how can I do it? It's impossible.

What we need then is to do bodybuilding for the brain, that is, expand the base of knowledge and comparisons it has; force it to work instead of taking ready-made results. But what would this physical conditioning be like?

The only way to make our Mr. Lazy get serious and be in shape for new challenges is to confront the system with something it doesn't know how to interpret, because it has never seen anything like it before. This forces the creation of new classification categories, or, as I like to say, new shelves, little boxes or drawers in our repertoire.

It's as if we had shelves to store all the information inside our head, to retrieve them when we need them. Well, those who don't question and just follow rules have a few shelves set up by others, with simplistic, repeated, shallow, and very, very prejudiced ideas.

When we read, doubt, get to know new places, new habits and new ideas, we build entire wardrobes inside our head, full of shelves, drawers, and sophisticated classification systems. It's not that we don't practice predictive categorization anymore, but it becomes more refined, more precise.

Our brain was designed to be biased, that is, to use predictive categorization to save energy.

Notice that prejudice is exactly this: instead of considering all variables, we take only a piece of information and draw an entire conclusion according to our previous experience .

For those who want to blindly obey nature and truly save energy, it's simple and comfortable. In fact, this explains why we have a compulsion to put labels on things, people, and situations — because this way it's easier to find the place to put them inside our "shelves."

But, besides preventing a person from being innovative, that is, producing many new ideas, there are other very harmful side effects in simply accepting having a limited repertoire: the person themselves suffers and makes others suffer.

Those who are too lazy to think and have few "shelves" in their head, can't have much contact with the real world, which is increasingly complex and interconnected. If a person only has two little boxes for gender, for example, and they see something they can't register, the ideal would be to build a new one to store this new information.

Since their brain no longer knows how to build shelves (nor remembers the last time it did this), what happens? This person freaks out. They suffer. The world doesn't fit in their head (of course!). They don't know what to do. They say it's wrong, it's not how they learned (that is, it doesn't fit in the shelves they have); that what's different is bad, evil, needs to be eliminated.

In extreme cases, this person beats and even kills (this is the case of homophobics, sexists, racists, xenophobes, and others who can't deal with those who don't fit the standards that their prejudices have established).

This is so true that Canadian research has shown that people with below-average intelligence levels and lower cognitive capacity tend to be more prejudiced. Homophobic people, for example, have a low level of abstract reasoning capacity. No wonder; if a brain doesn't exercise, doesn't learn, doesn't develop.

In the end, this continuous carpentry work of always building new "shelves" to classify information is like brain bodybuilding. It's what makes us intelligent humans, what makes us evolve; ultimately, what makes our world bigger and richer.

How to increase your repertoire

The best way to do this is to expose your brain to things it doesn't know and, therefore, doesn't have stored to reuse. Here are some suggestions:

Social work: makes you know realities outside your social bubble. People with stories, trajectories, and cultures different from yours. It's almost like taking a free course; you think you're helping someone, but you're the one benefiting the most.

Travel: Getting to know different places, cultures, foods, habits, and languages will certainly expand the number of "shelves" in your head.

Exhibitions: You know that contemporary art exhibition you didn't understand and even think isn't art? It's because the concept of art is already a ready-made and defined shelf in your head; and your brain is making maximum effort to reuse it. Think about it.

Books and movies: You can live other lives in other times and places, put yourself in situations you never imagined, just by reading or watching a movie. But attention: books have the additional benefit of exercising our imagination, after all a novel is just an instruction manual for creating the story — you have to imagine everything. In movies, the director, actors, and production team have already done this for you.

Courses: Anything new you're going to learn that brings knowledge you didn't have before, expands your repertoire and the way you see the world.

Languages: Learning a new language doesn't only include grammar and vocabulary; it also comprises a new culture and way of thinking. In fact, there are studies that show we have personality variations according to the language we're speaking. It's not just shelves or drawers: it's an entire closet being built in your head!

There is no such thing as "outside the box"

Remember we started this article promising to explain how ideas are born? Well:

Ideas arise from the combination of what we already have in our repertoire.

There's no such thing as "thinking outside the box" (by the way, there's a great book that talks exactly about this: Inside the Box, by Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg). The box is our repertoire, there's no way to create without using the ingredients that are already inside.

Want an example? Think of a color that doesn't exist. Think. Try a little more.

Did you succeed? No, right? Our box (or our repertoire) has a spectrum of colors to work with and can't "get out" of that.

Even the most creative fiction books use metaphors of things we already know to present new concepts. We can't imagine a 10-dimensional object because our visual perception can only see 3: width, height, and depth.

At most, we can combine in an original way what we already have.

So, what can we do? Increase the number of elements inside the box to also increase the possibility of making combinations. This is basic combinatorial analysis: the more elements I have, the more combinations are possible.

Another alternative is to connect with other boxes; this is called empathy, which is basically seeing the world with another person's repertoire.

The AIs' repertoire

By the way, this is exactly the problem with generative AIs, especially chats; their repertoire is limited to what's published and available on the Internet. They don't have access to sensations, feelings, or emotions to give meaning to data.

In their repertoire there's only data and what they do is search for the most probable sequence of data, according to what you ask. Many people think they're intelligent because they solve problems, but they just gather and organize information that already exists, without having the slightest idea of what this set of data really means. Only a human being, with their emotions, is capable of giving meaning to this.

Besides bringing solutions based on what already exists, with continued use of these agents, most of what will be available on the internet will have been generated by AI — which ends up becoming a closed cycle with human beings practically on the outside. AIs generate content that, in turn, is consumed by AIs and returns again to the database.

Only human beings can break this cycle and enrich this repertoire that becomes collective. That's why, once again, we emphasize: it has never been more important to develop human creativity than now.

2. Connections

Ok, we already have a broad and varied repertoire in constant development. But that alone isn't enough to be creative. No cook becomes a chef just because they have a pantry stocked with the best ingredients in the world.

What we need now is to connect the parts and combine the elements in an unusual and original way.

Creativity is essentially practical.

Here we'll present some exercise suggestions, but it's important to know that the possibilities are infinite!

Storytelling

You can create the habit of inventing stories anywhere you are and you don't need anything beyond your brain.

For example: you can invent imaginary dialogues while waiting in line (you can imagine roles — the man on the right is a secret agent trying to discretely pass information to the lady in the back); you can imagine life stories for any person passing in front of you, you can create a script just with small objects you find on the ground, you can take a random word you heard or read and try to create a story from that point.

You can change the point of view (what did this chair see today? What kind of papers has this paperclip brought together in its life? In what situation did the stain on this man's shirt happen? What would those mannequins be talking about if they could speak? What things has that streetlight illuminated that nobody can know? What are those little birds discussing? Anyway, when it comes to storytelling, there really are no limits; not even the sky).

You can do like Edgar Allan Poe, the famous American writer, to find connections in unlikely places for your stories. When Poe had to create a plot for a story, he would look for two or three words randomly in a dictionary and try to associate them. You can exercise this creating small stories.

Impossible objects

We rarely train ourselves to think outside of what we know. Our impossible ideas are rare and difficult. Want to see? Set 5 minutes on the clock and try to think of three truly impossible things.

Here are some examples to inspire you:

Mobile wind farms: I kept imagining that wind farms could have a WhatsApp group and one would tell the others where the wind is blowing. Then they'd all go there, enjoy the moment, and then walk to the next windstorm.

Glasses to see pain: You put them on and immediately see where it hurts. Good for pediatricians and veterinarians.

Colored clouds: there would be an artist in each city (a team could take turns) to choose the colors of the clouds each rainy season. The bolder cities would have patterned clouds.

Other exercises

Any activity that combines different elements from your repertoire counts as practice for stimulating creativity.

Think of impossible dialogues and develop them (for example: what would the conversation between Queen Elizabeth and your next-door neighbor be like? What would they talk about?).

Think of useless superpowers (like absorbing bad luck or resurrecting insects).

In fact, use your creativity and all your repertoire to generate more ideas about how to generate ideas. How about that?

3. Intentionality

Last, but not least, the most important element of the triad is intentionality. It basically consists of always asking yourself: why?

Why am I doing this? What do I want as an objective? Am I using my repertoire to reach this solution? Who does it benefit?

And this is the part that most differentiates a human being from an AI; AI doesn't have intentionality, because, basically, to make this evaluation and answer the questions, you need to understand:

• the purpose

• the context

• the feelings (yours and those involved)

• the perceptions (yours and those involved)

• the awareness and recognition that there are biases in your repertoire

• the evaluation of impacts this idea can cause and, finally,

• RESPONSIBILITY.

And AIs were built and trained only to fulfill tasks. They don't question why. They don't measure consequences. They have no idea what feelings or perceptions are.

They simply cannot assume any kind of responsibility.

Don't use AI in these cases

AIs are extremely useful systems if well used, but care is needed. About this, I saw an excellent summary from a content creator called Jay Clouse. He says he does NOT outsource to AI tasks he:

• likes to do

• needs to practice to improve

• makes him unique.

That said, we can summarize as follows: don't trust an AI. It doesn't think, doesn't feel, doesn't reason, no matter how much it seems like it does — it's not intelligent.

It can't take into consideration an intentionality analysis. AI only presents statistically more probable answers based on its database. It doesn't care if the data is true or the best; its criterion is statistical.

Moreover, it doesn't know the concept of privacy — so don't share your data unnecessarily.

Use AI in these cases

Ok, so how to use AI intentionally?

You can, for example, ask it to:

• provide limits for your ideation exercise

• test hypothetical scenarios (that you come up with)

• ask provocative questions

• explore different points of view (ex: optimistic, pessimistic, critical, etc).

What you can't do is ask it to think for you, make decisions for you, precisely because of its lack of intentionality.

Conclusions

In summary, the creativity triad can be applied in your day-to-day life, as a lifestyle. You don't need equipment, techniques, or training; you need nothing. Just a brain.

Moreover, the triad explains why AI can be very useful, but should remain in a secondary role, as an assistant and collaborator in creative functions; never as the main actor or with decision-making power.

Remember:

Creativity is a lifestyle. The only one possible for those who want to remain relevant in the market.