Stanford Creativity Expert: This Simple Shift will 10x Your AI CreativityㅣJeremy Utley

Summary

In a lively discussion, Stanford's creativity and AI expert Jeremy Utley delves into the transformative potential of AI in fostering creativity. He draws parallels to historical figures like Winston Churchill, highlighting how modern AI tools enable non-technical individuals to achieve feats once reserved for a select few. Utley emphasizes a paradigm shift—viewing AI not just as a tool, but as a teammate that can enhance creative processes. Through anecdotes and practical advice, he illustrates how embracing AI can catalyze extraordinary productivity and innovation, urging creators to leverage AI for inspiration and collaboration rather than mere assistance.

Highlights

• Utley admires Winston Churchill's creativity spurred by downtime, relating it to modern AI capabilities. 🛀
• Non-technical people can now have AI as an assistant, akin to historical figures' privileges. 🤖
• Utley shifted from being an AI novice to a proponent studying AI's impact on creativity with teams. 📚
• A park ranger created an AI tool saving substantial labor time, showing practical AI impact. 🏞️
• The key to AI success: treat it as a collaborator, offering feedback and direction. 🌐
• Inspiration isn't just a spark of genius; it's a discipline that enriches AI utilization. 🌿

Key Takeaways

• Treat AI as a teammate, not just a tool, to unlock its full potential in creative work. 🤝
• AI can guide you in discovering creative applications you hadn't imagined. 🤔
• Shift your mindset to push past 'good enough' ideas for exceptional creativity. 🚀
• Non-technical individuals can harness AI for remarkable innovation and productivity. 🌟
• Inspiration and personal experience are key inputs for creative AI outputs. 🎨

Overview

Jeremy Utley, a Stanford expert in creativity and AI, shares insights into how AI can unleash human creativity beyond conventional norms. Just like Churchill found inspiration in everyday moments, AI offers modern creators a chance to innovate by acting as a digital counterpart that understands personal context and voice. Utley paints a vivid picture of AI not just as a tool but as a collaborative teammate that learns and evolves with its user.

By recounting personal experiences, like how a park ranger used AI to automate tedious paperwork, Utley demonstrates the power of AI in transforming everyday professional tasks into efficient processes. The anecdote underscores AI's role not just in saving time but in fostering creativity and problem-solving among non-technical users.

Utley also explores the mindset necessary to extract the most value from AI collaboration. He emphasizes moving beyond treating AI as just a tool, and instead collaborating with it for creativity, requiring discipline and open-mindedness. He inspires creators to leverage their unique experiences and insights when working with AI, thereby turning the partnership into a fertile ground for innovation.

Chapters

• 10:00 - 20:00: Chapter1. Don't Ask AI, Let It Ask You The chapter reflects on the unpredictability of innovation, suggesting that great ideas often come at unexpected moments, such as when one is not actively working or is involved in mundane activities. It uses the example of Winston Churchill, who famously dictated important national addresses while in the bathtub, to illustrate how inspiration can strike in relaxed settings. The narrative highlights how even during such informal scenarios, significant contributions, like speeches and ideas, can be formed.
• 20:00 - 35:00: Chapter2. Do not Use AI, Treat It as a Teammate In this chapter, the narrator emphasizes the importance of integrating AI as a teammate rather than merely a tool. The content discusses the desire to have an assistant that comprehends the user’s context, voice, and intent, facilitating tasks like speech writing. This capability is now accessible to many, exemplified by the villagers in Palo Alto, who have technology previously reserved for figures like Winston Churchill.
• 35:00 - 45:00: Chapter3. How to Go Beyond ‘Good Enough’ Ideas The chapter discusses the feasibility of dictating an address from a bathtub, showcasing the capabilities of current technology. It explores the theme of human agency in the age of AI, emphasizing the role of creativity and collaboration. Jeremy Utley, an adjunct professor at Stanford University, highlights his experience teaching at the intersection of creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, and AI.

Stanford Creativity Expert: This Simple Shift will 10x Your AI CreativityㅣJeremy Utley Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 I've always been jealous of Winston Churchill. There's a quote, by the way. The history of innovation is the bed, the bus and the bathtub. It's always these moments when we're not really thinking about work or we're kind of doing something else that good ideas come to us. Winston Churchill, He's sitting in the bathtub, and he's dictating a national address to his assistant who's in the other room. She's saying, "distinguished ladies and gentlemen" "Don't call them distinguished" "They're not" This is the Gary Oldman version. "They're not distinguished."
• 00:30 - 01:00 You know, "Dear ladies and gentlemen, we have gathered together." "Get to the point!" and I'm watching this going I would give anything to have an assistant who understood my context and my voice and my intent well enough that I could sit in the bath and they could write my speech. Now, the poorest villager in Palo Alto can have what only Winston Churchill used to have, which is an assistant that has my context and my voice and my intent available to me
• 01:00 - 01:30 so that when I'm in the bathtub, I can be dictating my address. That is absolutely technically possible today. Exploring Human Agency in the age of AI Exploring Human Agency in the age of AI : Uncoded Ep.1 How to Become a Better Collaborator with AI I'm Jeremy Utley, I'm an adjunct professor of creativity and AI at Stanford University. I've been teaching at Stanford for the last 15 years at the intersection of creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, and now
• 01:30 - 02:00 increasingly, artificial intelligence. The topic that I'm most focused on right now is helping non-technical professionals learn to be good collaborators to or with generative AI. And then two years ago, myself and my partner at the time, Perry Klebahn, wrote a book called Idea Flow, which was the canonical book on idea generation and prototyping. So super proud of that. It was the culmination of a dozen years of leading executive programs
• 02:00 - 02:30 and the leadership program and the entrepreneurship program at Stanford. And one month after our book came out, ChatGPT came out. To me, the fact that I wrote the canonical book on Idea generation just prior to AI is like writing the best book on retail just before the internet. AI is a tool to dramatically augment and amplify our creativity. And the truth is, I didn't know a lot about it when the book came out.
• 02:30 - 03:00 So one month after my book came out, instead of going on a world book tour, I strapped myself back into the front row as a student and said, I need to be learning about this transformative new technology. So I started taking classes. I started conducting research. I started working with and studying teams inside of organizations, using the tool to understand the simple question, how does generative AI impact the individual and the team and the
• 03:00 - 03:30 organization's ability to solve problems? Chapter1. Don't Ask AI, Let It Ask You You can give an AI a prompt, for example. How should I answer this question? Or you could give an AI the question I want to ask how I should answer this question. What's the best way of framing that question to an AI? So you see what I did there? I asked AI for how to ask I my question, but you can use AI to use AI, which is you couldn't use Excel to use Excel.
• 03:30 - 04:00 PowerPoint can't teach you how to use PowerPoint. Email can't teach you how to use email. AI strangely can teach you how to use itself if you think to ask. Go to your language model of choice and just say the following. Hey, you're an AI expert. I would love your help and a consultation with you to help me figure out where I can best leverage AI in my life. As an AI expert, would you please ask me questions one question at a time,
• 04:00 - 04:30 until you have enough context about my workflows and responsibilities and KPIs and and objectives that you could make two obvious recommendations and two non-obvious recommendations for how AI could leverage AI in my work. you will have one of the most enlightening and illuminating conversations you've ever had, and it's all because of AI's ability to evaluate its own work. What I've seen is non-technical employees are able to do incredible things. Here's one example. The National Park Service called me and asked me if I would
• 04:30 - 05:00 conduct a training program for a bunch of backcountry rangers, so they gathered a group of about 60 backcountry rangers and facilities managers into a training session, and I spent a couple of hours over zoom teaching folks the basics of collaborating with AI. One of the people in that session was a gentleman named Adam Rymer, who works at Glen Canyon National Park. And one of the things I say is you should focus on parts of your work that you dread.
• 05:00 - 05:30 Parts of your work that you don't enjoy. "Ah, I have to do this again." And Adam said, if I have to replace the carpet tiles in the lodge. I have to fill out all this paperwork. And so to replace a carpet tile will sometimes take 2 or 3 days of paperwork. Then he thought, could AI help me write that paperwork? And in 45 minutes, he built a tool with natural language that saves him two days of work. Every day he makes a statement of work and then listen to this.
• 05:30 - 06:00 Someone got access to that tool and shared it across the other parks. There's about 430 parks in the service. The National Park Service is estimating that the tool that Adam built in 45 minutes is going to save the service 7000 days of human labor this year. That's the kind of impact that normal professionals can have, even without any technical ability, if only they're given very basic foundational training.
• 06:00 - 06:30 Chapter2. Do not Use AI, Treat It as a Teammate People are wanting to learn AI and how it can be transformative for their business, but they don't have the basic language. And so while lots of organizations are asking me how can we work with AI to transform our business? Where I have to start with them is how do you work with AI? The research I'm familiar with suggests that while on the one hand, AI makes people 25% faster and 12% more work and 40% better quality, it's also true that less than 10% of working professionals
• 06:30 - 07:00 are deriving meaningful productivity gains from collaboration with AI. To me, there's this enormous gap. I call it the realization gap. We conducted studies both in Europe and in the United States. And what we found is, surprisingly, AI didn't help most people be more creative. In fact, in many cases, the people that we studied, AI made them less creative. And as we started digging into the research, we were surprised and looked at the data.
• 07:00 - 07:30 We were confused because you think AI should make people more creative, not less. And we studied the underperformers and then we studied the Outperformers. And what we found is the Outperformers had a fundamentally different orientation towards AI than the underperformers did, whereas the underperformers treated AI like a tool. The outperformers treated AI like a teammate, and shifting your orientation from tool to teammate changes everything
• 07:30 - 08:00 about the kinds of outcomes that you can achieve working with generative AI. A simple example is what do you do when it gives you mediocre results? If it's a tool, you get a mediocre result and then maybe you improve it. Or maybe you say, it's no good at doing that. If it's a teammate who's giving you a mediocre result, think about the last teammate who gave you work product that wasn't sufficient. You gave them feedback. You gave them coaching, you gave them mentorship, you helped them improve it.
• 08:00 - 08:30 And so what we found is that people who treat AI like a teammate, coach it and give it feedback and importantly, get it to ask them questions. The fundamental orientation a lot of people take towards AI is I'm the question asker. AI is the answer giver. But if you think about AI like a teammate, you say, hey, what are ten questions I should ask about this? Or what do you need to know from me in order to get the best response?
• 08:30 - 09:00 So things, for example, like you have a difficult conversation coming up with a coworker. Did you know you could leverage a large language model to roleplay that conversation? You can get an AI to interview you about your conversation partner, and then construct a psychological profile of your conversation partner, and then play the role of your conversation partner in a roleplay, and then give you feedback from the perspective of your conversation partner on how you approach the conversation. That's something you can do today, and there are many things like that.
• 09:00 - 09:30 I call them drills, but there are many things like that where if someone will just shift their consideration set of what are the things I can do with AI. They end up discovering applications that I've never even dreamed of. I've been doing this stuff for two years, and my students are regularly coming to me with use cases I've never imagined that landed them in a destination I could have never predicted, and they could never have predicted.
• 09:30 - 10:00 For me, I never thought about myself as a creative individual. Now, I fully and fundamentally believe every single human being has innate creative capacity. Every single one of us. What the D.school has helped me do is unlock others. Everyone has this latent creative capacity. Once I was teaching a class with a hip hop artist named Lecrae. He's a multi-time Grammy Award winning artist, and he and I are teaching a class to graduate students at Stanford, and we're giving them the assignment. You've got to go get inspiration in the world.
• 10:00 - 10:30 And what I can see is it's like looking at myself in the mirror ten years ago, because all of the business school students in the class are going, "inspiration?" And I just felt Lecrae is clearly the The creative legend in the room. I said, Lecrae, what do you think about inspiration? And of course, as only a hip hop artist could do, he dropped a bar. He said, inspiration is a discipline. And I realized in that moment, for these students, it's not even on their radar as a tool, let alone a routine part of their life.
• 10:30 - 11:00 But the most wildly creative individuals I know are disciplined about cultivating the inputs to their thinking, because they know it affects the outputs of their thinking. And so, even in regards to AI, I push people. What is the inspiration you're bringing to the model? Everybody has the same access to the same ChatGPT. How do I get a different output than you do? It's because of what I bring to the model. And what do I bring to the model? Certainly I bring technique, but I also bring my experience.
• 11:00 - 11:30 I bring my perspective. I bring all the inspiration I've gleaned from the world. That's what gets a user a differential output from a model. Chapter3. How to Go Beyond ‘Good Enough’ Ideas A seventh grader in Ohio who I don't even know what her name is, but her teacher asked, what is creativity? And she put a post-it note up on the board that says, Creativity is doing more than the first thing you think of. And that's my favorite definition, because it speaks to a profound
• 11:30 - 12:00 cognitive bias that we hold. It's been called functional fixedness. It's been called the Einstellung effect. But the basic premise is humans tend to fixate on an early solution and be satisfied. Herbert Simon called it satisficing, but it's the idea that if we get to good enough, it's enough. And that's why I love that seventh graders definition. Creativity is doing more than the first thing you think of. It's pushing past. Good enough. Is the definition of creativity changing in the age of AI?
• 12:00 - 12:30 I don't think so. The reality is, with AI, it's now easier than ever to get good enough. If your goal is world class, if your goal is exceptional, then what you want to be prompting for is actually volume and variation, and that takes time. It takes time to not only read through it, but to sort it and to process it. But fundamentally, the definition of creativity doesn't change in the age of AI.
• 12:30 - 13:00 It's just that the human's ability or inability to arrive at a creative state is affected not only by the technology, but also by their stated or unstated objectives in collaborating with it. Creators don't need to be afraid of AI. Creators need to dive in. They need to lean in. Creators are about to be unleashed in a way they've never been unleashed before. The only correct answer to the question how do you use AI? Is I don't. I don't use AI. I work with it.
• 13:00 - 13:30 When you start working with AI, it will change everything.