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The problem with being human is that we’re stuck in our own heads, and a lot of decisions that are bad result from us not having enough perspectives. AI is very good and a cheap way of providing additional perspectives. You don’t have to listen to its advice, but getting its advice, forcing you to reflect for a moment, forcing you to think and either reject or accept it already helps you be a better decision-maker. Using a sounding board for the kinds of conversations you’re having before you make a major decision can be a really helpful technique even if you don’t listen to it at all.
Treat AI like a team member
The early evidence is that AI already out-innovates most people. I know that’s an uncomfortable topic, but it’s just true. So my colleagues at Wharton, who literally wrote the book on product development and innovation, conducted a study where they had the MBA students generate 200 business ideas, GPT 4 generate 200 business ideas, and they had outside judges judge the ideas by willingness to pay. Of the top 40 ideas by willingness to pay, 35 came from the AI, only 5 from the humans in the room. Other creative work is showing the same thing. I think people who are in creative industries find that unnerving.
I view the AI as a team member you bring to the brainstorming room. They’re creative in their own ways. They have their own set of biases. And why would you not bring another team member in? The chance that it’s gonna out-create you in everything is very small, and you’re still the person selecting, building on, and developing the idea. So if you treat AI like a team member, it stops being as threatening. Right? It’s a source of inspiration. It’s a source of conversation. I spoke to a Harvard physicist who says he gets his best ideas chatting with Chat GPT in quantum physics. A lot of us feel stifled creatively, and having a partner who can work with you and doesn’t ever judge you can often feel very liberating.
Get weird
Idea generation is different than most other work because we want to embrace variance. You want good ideas and bad ideas because it’s easy to filter the bad ones, and giving yourself the freedom to come up with good and bad ideas lets you come up with a higher variance of good ideas. Improv comedy. You’re testing a whole bunch of things. Most of the things won’t work. Some of the ideas are gonna be terrible, but if you have enough flights of fancy, you come up with something truly amazing. And the AI is really good at coming up with super weird ideas. So you can ask it to create crazy suggestions for you. What’s the most complicated way to solve this problem? What’s the most expensive way to solve this problem? How would a supervillain make this problem worse? And because the AI is really good at this, you could combine ideas from different places to come up with really novel combinations. All of these things could serve as inspiration, as a grist for the mill of your own innovation process.