15 Articles about AI & the Creative Arts

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The Impact of AI on Creativity in a Dozen Recent Articles

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Get in a creative mood by visiting large spaces

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If you’re in a cramped space, say your office is a little cubicle, your visual attention can’t spread out. It’s focused in this narrow space. Just as your visual attention is constricted, your conceptual attention becomes narrow and focused, and your thinking is more likely to be analytical.

But if you’re in a large space – a big office, with high ceilings, or outside — your visual attention expands to fill the space, and your conceptual attention expands.

That’s why a lot of creative figures like to be outdoors, to take long walks in nature, and they get their inspiration from being in the wide, open spaces. If you can see far and wide, then you can think far and wide.

Brigid Schulte writing in the Washington Post

The Impact of AI on Creativity in 19 Articles

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Don’t Wait for Inspiration

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Chuck Close said, “Inspiration is for amateurs. Us professionals, we just go to work in the morning.”  One thing I really love about that quote is it relieves you a lot of pressure. It’s not about waiting for hours for this moment where inspiration strikes. It’s just about showing up and getting started. All that matters is that you enable the chance for something amazing to happen.

Christoph Niemann

16 Articles about AI & Creativity

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Disrupter’s DNA

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Clay Christensen (who wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma and came up with the idea of “disruptive innovation”) put together a study called The Innovator’s DNA, which attempts to take us inside the minds of successful innovators. Christensen and his fellow researchers believe it's more than a case of good genes when it comes to disruptive innovators. Christensen found five habits common among them:

  1. associating: Innovators connect seemingly unconnected things (He writes, "Innovative breakthroughs often happen at the intersection of diverse disciplines and fields).

  2. questioning: Innovators keep asking why things aren’t done differently ("What would happen if we did this?"). Questions outnumber answers in conversations and a good question is respected as much as a good answer.

  3. observing: Innovators are also intense observers. They pay attention to detail.

  4. networking: They are great at networking ideas. They are constantly "finding and testing ideas through a diverse network of individuals."

  5. experimenting: Innovators are constantly trying out new experiences and ideas. They "explore the world intellectually and experientially, testing hypotheses along the way."

Read more here.

11 Articles about AI & Creativity

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13 creative things people are trying to get AI to do

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Can AI Read my mind?

A.I. Is Getting Better at Mind-Reading In a recent experiment, researchers used large language models to translate brain activity into words. – New York Times

Can AI translate the Bible?

USC researchers use AI to help translate Bible into very rare languages – Religious News Service

Can AI make astrological readings?

Is A.I. the Future of Astrology? – New York Times

Can AI Do your taxes?

Ready for AI to help you do your taxes? Taxfyle’s got you covered – Refresh Miami

How about answering questions from a ‘biblical’ perspective?

Christian creators build chatbots with ‘biblical’ worldview – Religious News Service

Can AI change the way wars are fought?

Our Oppenheimer Moment: The Creation of AI Weapons – New York Times

Can AI replace humans?

We Went to the Fast-Food Drive-Through to Find Out – Wall Street Journal

Can AI build websites?

Mobile website builder Universe launches AI-powered designer – Tech Crunch

Can AI write sermons?

Start-up AI Platform Aims to Help Pastors Make the Most of Their Sunday Sermons – Christian Standard 

Can AI write a song?

We asked Google’s new AI music bot to write us a song. We instantly regretted it – Science Focus

Can AI pilot airplanes or drones?

AI pilots, the future of aerial warfare – Air Force Tech

Can AI bring historical figures to life?

AI Chatbots Now Let You Talk to Historical Figures Like Shakespeare and Andy Warhol – My Modern Met 

Can AI create decent headshots?

I Used AI To Create My Professional Headshots And The Results Were Either Great Or Hilarious – Digg

Managing Yourself

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If you understand how you think and work, you have more control over who you will become. Abilities can improve as you understand how your mind works.

Creative and critically thinking people open a conversation with themselves that allows them to understand, control, and improve their own minds and work.

Ken Bain, What the Best College Students Do

When Habits Imprison Us

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Like the professor who sticks to a daily routine of a quiet supper, an evening walk, and early to bed, we all need space in our lives where unthinking habits relieve us of deciding simple tasks. By finding comfort in his sedentary home life, the professor provides thinking room to explore creative ideas in his field.

When we do the same, these daily habits can be critical in providing us with needed balance and continuity. However, when the routine becomes an end in itself, maintaining our cherished inconsequential details can become a way to avoid life's bigger issues as we neglect the needs of others. The box we build (and hide within) keeps us away from the things that refresh our spirits and give our lives meaning.

Stephen Goforth

Experiencing more awe

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Experiencing more awe is associated with living healthier and more meaningful lives. A 2021 study reported that feeling more awe is correlated with reporting feeling lowered levels of daily stress.

Positive experiences of awe have also been found to increase feelings of well-being, life satisfaction and sense of meaning. Emerging research shows that experiencing awe may make us more curious, creative and compassionate people.  

Richard Sima writing in the Washington Post

Does refusing to act your age delay aging?

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In a UK study, researchers found "people who thought old age began earlier were more likely to have had a heart attack, to be suffering from heart disease or be in poor physical health generally when they were followed up six to nine years later."

Becca Levy of The Yale School of Public Health "followed more than a thousand people who were at least 50 at the time. She found that people who had positive ideas about their own ageing (who agreed with comments such as "I have as much pep as last year" and who disagreed that as you get older you get less useful) lived for an average of 22.6 years after they first participated in the study, while the people who felt less positively about ageing lived for just 15 years more on average."

Claudia Hammond writing for BBC Future suggests "People who think old age starts later in life may be more conscious about their health and fitness and therefore take active steps to stay in better shape. They think they are younger and so behave in younger ways, creating a virtuous circle."

Wanna be creative? Get some sleep!

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One of the most interesting discoveries of neuroscience of the last 20 years is that when you acquire memories, they’re stored in temporary, fragile form, like cement. When you pour it, initially it’s soft, but when it dries and hardens, it becomes strong and durable. Memories are like that. They become hardened through a process of consolidation, which happens largely during sleep.

Memory consolidation actually transforms the memory, as well. It brings out details, hidden relationships. That can be the stuff of creativity and insight.

That’s why there are so many stories of people waking up in the middle of the night with a new idea or solution to a problem. Like Paul McCartney. He was awakened one morning with this melody in his head. It was the song, “Yesterday.” It just appeared to him. Sleep supercharges creativity.

Brigid Schulte writing in The Washington Post

Wanna be creative? Set aside time to do nothing!

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Doing nothing is creative work. Because when you’re consciously doing nothing, the conscious part is only a tiny part of what your brain is. The rest of it, the unconscious, is chugging away all the time. There’s this process cognitive psychologists call “incubation” – the brain churning over associations. And these associations can pop into awareness as insight. The incubation process is supercharged during sleep, and also when doing nothing, letting your mind wander and having no particular task to perform. 

 If you keep people’s minds busy all the time with tasks, that inhibits this incubation process. I don’t want to say that people should become Luddites and get rid of all the gadgets and become hermits – all that provides raw data for incubation. 

But what we need is a balance between doing nothing and doing something – we need both to fuel creativity and insight.

Brigid Schulte writing in the Washington Post

 

It’s not time management, it’s attention management

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In his book “When,” Dan Pink writes about evidence that your circadian rhythm can help you figure out the right time to do your productive and creative work. If you’re a morning person, you should do your analytical work early when you’re at peak alertness; your routine tasks around lunchtime in your trough; and your creative work in the late afternoon or evening when you’re more likely to do nonlinear thinking. If you’re more of a night owl, you might be better off flipping creative projects to your fuzzy mornings and analytical tasks to your clearest-eyed late afternoon and evening moments. It’s not time management, because you might spend the same amount of time on the tasks even after you rearrange your schedule. It’s attention management: You’re noticing the order of tasks that works for you and adjusting accordingly.

Adam Grant, writing in the New York Times

Puzzles and Positive Moods

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Puzzle-solving is such an ancient, universal practice, scholars say, precisely because it depends on creative insight, on the primitive spark that ignited the first campfires.

And now, modern neuroscientists are beginning to tap its source. 

Researchers at Northwestern University found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine. 

“What we think is happening,” said Mark Beeman, a neuroscientist who conducted the study with Karuna Subramaniam, a graduate student, “is that the humor, this positive mood, is lowering the brain’s threshold for detecting weaker or more remote connections” to solve puzzles. 

Marcel Danesi, a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto (says) “It’s all about you, using your own mind, without any method or schema, to restore order from chaos. And once you have, you can sit back and say, ‘Hey, the rest of my life may be a disaster, but at least I have a solution.’ ” 

Researchers at the University of Toronto found that the visual areas in people in positive moods picked up more background detail, even when they were instructed to block out distracting information during a computer task.

The findings fit with dozens of experiments linking positive moods to better creative problem-solving. “The implication is that positive mood engages this broad, diffuse attentional state that is both perceptual and visual,” said Dr. Anderson. “You’re not only thinking more broadly, you’re literally seeing more. The two systems are working in parallel.”

Benedict Carey writing in the New York Times

Working the Creative Muscle

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Creativity can give people a competitive edge in any profession, from firefighting to oil trading. The challenge is knowing when we need to be creative and how to do it, says Balder Onarheim, co-founder of the Copenhagen Institute of NeuroCreativity. Creativity requires a lot of energy, and the brain is designed to conserve energy, especially in stressful situations, so “if it can reuse an old pattern, it will,” he says. “For most people, it’s actually about knowing when to help push your brain out of the normal way of dealing with things.” 

When seeking inspiration, many people look for ideas around issues similar to the one they’re stuck on. The genius of Oblique Strategies, says Onarheim, is that it introduces an element of randomness that breaks that mold. It’s the same reason people often have their best ideas in the shower or on a walk through the woods rather than sitting at a desk.

Jess Shankleman writing for Bloomberg Business

A loss can set you free

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Deafness freed Beethoven as a composer because he no longer had society’s soundtrack in his ears. Perhaps therein lies a lesson for each of us. I know, I know: You’re no Beethoven. But as you read the lines above, maybe you could relate to the great composer’s loss in some small way. Have you lost something that defined your identity? Maybe it involves your looks. Or your social prestige. Or your professional relevance. How might this loss set you free? 

You might finally define yourself in new ways, free from the boundaries you set for yourself based on the expectations of others. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in the Washington Post

The creative spirit

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Children are naturally creative, playful, and experimental. If you ask me, we were the most human when we were young kids. We "worked" on our art. Sometimes for hours at a time without a break, because it was in us, though we did intellectualize it. As we got older, fears crept in, and doubts, and self-censoring, and over-thinking. The creative spirit is in us now, it’s who we are. We just need to look at the kids around us to be reminded of that. And whether you are 28 or 88 today, it’s never too late, because the child is still in you. 

Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen