Art has been around for centuries, but in the age of artificial intelligence, one University of Houston researcher is examining whether generative AI helps or hurts creativity. Jinghui Hou, lead author and assistant professor in the C. T. Bauer College of Business, began researching AI's impact on creativity when the applications first became popular. Hou and her team recently analyzed the nuances of how generative AI can influence creativity, depending on the context, in a paper published in Information Systems Research.
Researchers identified two distinct stages of creativity: ideation and convergent thinking. They define the ideation stage as brainstorming what to create.
"In the first stage, we find that for anyone, including ordinary people and expert designers, AI is very helpful because of its computational power," Hou said. "It can go beyond the imagination that humans have. For example, if I wanted to imagine a tiger with wings, it would be hard to see that in my head, but AI can do it easily."
In the stage of convergent thinking, they found that AI impacts creative professionals differently than designers with lower levels of expertise. Following ideation, convergent thinking demonstrates putting technology into action to create art.
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