I recently came across a Harvard Business Review article that grabbed my attention enough to read it – Don’t Let Gen AI Limit Your Team’s Creativity.
THE SKINNY:
- Two researchers partnered with four companies (2 in Europe and 2 in the USA).
- Up to 60 employees in each firm were asked to work in small teams on a business problem their company faced.
- Some of the teams (those in the control group) approached the problem without any help from AI, while others (those in the experimental group) were given an open-source version of ChatGPT.
THE RESULT:
- The resulting ideas were judged, and grades from A (highly compelling) to D (not worth pursuing) were assigned.
- The judges had no idea which had emerged from human-machine collaborations.
- Teams using Chat GPT produced, on average, just 8% more ideas than teams in the control group did. They got 7% fewer D’s, but they also got 8% more B’s (interesting but needs development) and roughly the same share of C’s (needs significant development). Most surprising, they got 2% fewer A’s.
One of the study authors, Kian Gohar, had this to say,
“Generative AI helped workers avoid awful ideas, but it also led to more average ideas.”
MY TAKE-AWAY:
I did enjoy one of the sub-headings in the article. A great reminder for what AI is and represents…
Approach AI as an ongoing conversation partner, not an oracle
AI can be intimidating when you consider its speed and ability to take sometimes complex human tasks and make them look incredibly simple and easy to do. That should not get in the way of seeing AI for what it is… an incredibly speedy partner to help us spend more time on the things we’re really good at. I’ve had some incredible conversational partnerships with AI during its public existence. There is no doubt as to its value in my world, however, I also have no doubts about its limitations.
AI has helped me realise that I’ve spent large amounts of my life doing things that had to be done, because there was nobody else to do them. The wonderful gift of AI is that huge chunks of what I was doing can now largely be trusted to AI. Currently, my biggest challenge is to discover how and on what to use my newly available free time on.
GO DEEPER:
Read the full article here – Don’t Let Gen AI Limit Your Team’s Creativity.
