Study Finds ChatGPT Could Help People Develop Creativity in Everyday Tasks

ChatGPT, the generative artificial intelligence technology developed by OpenAI, could help humans with everyday creative tasks, even those that typically require the human ability to “read between the lines,” according to a new study from the University of Houston and Rice University. Its ability proved superior to traditional Google search or even human brainstorming without any technical assistance, the study’s authors say.

The article, “An Empirical Investigation of the Impact of ChatGPT on Creativity,” published in Nature Human Behaviordetails five experiments conducted by the ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) research team designed to evaluate the program’s creative ideation capabilities.

The researchers asked participants to generate creative ideas using ChatGPT, Google, or without assistance. They then used two groups of coders: participants from the same population and expert judges with more than five years of relevant professional experience. Both groups of coders, blind to conditions, rated the ideas generated by ChatGPT as superior in terms of creativity.

The study indeed demonstrated that using ChatGPT can increase the creativity of responses to everyday problem-solving tasks, such as generating gift ideas or repurposing unused objects. ChatGPT’s strength lies in its ability to bring together diverse concepts in a clear and coherent way, according to the researchers. It can combine distant concepts into a coherent form, the authors say.

“Our results show that ChatGPT is very effective at generating ideas that are incrementally new rather than radically new,” wrote authors Byung Cheol Lee, an assistant professor in UH’s CT Bauer College of Business, and Jaeyeon (Jae) Chung, a William S. Mackey Jr. Distinguished Assistant Professor in Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business.

“This result is a result of ChatGPT’s ability to combine different concepts from its database rather than inventing entirely new concepts from scratch.”

According to the report, ChatGPT also showed proficiency in tasks that people said required empathy.

“Previous beliefs have often emphasized the unique human ability to understand emotions, empathize, and ‘read between the lines,’ leading to the belief that ChatGPT would be insufficient in scenarios that seem to require such emotional understanding,” the authors wrote.

“Contrary to these expectations, our results show that ChatGPT displays remarkable performance in these same tasks. This finding highlights the potential of ChatGPT to help not only in analytical tasks, but also in tasks that traditionally require emotional understanding.”