On my walk this morning I listened to the latest episode of Cal Newport’s podcast Deep Questions which was about “creativity hacking”. He reviewed a couple of his techniques, shared a few links to good articles related to the topic, etc. For example, he talked about using different venues for working – such as moving between multiple locations in a single day. He cited several other techniques that he’s used all of which involved helping lift your mind out of the mundane to stimulate its ability to get creative.
Listening to Cal stimulated my mind to make the bridge between something like working on a whiteboard in front of a group of colleagues and, in lieu of humans, working on a topic with an AI chatbot like Claude, Bard, ChatGPT, etc.
I’m drawn to this approach because of just how low the overhead is to start to use chatbots for helping in my thinking and creativity processes. Unlike other humans, the chatbots are always available – 24×7 – and generally they’re pleasant and polite to interact with. Sometimes humans are too but they can also be unpleasant and impolite!
The speed of the interaction with a chatbot is probably slower than with another human or group of humans but I don’t find that to be an issue. In some ways, the ability to just pause, give me time to think, and then interact again with a chatbot is more pleasant and completely eliminates any peer pressure I might be feeling.
I can also use chatbots to respond to challenging questions I might ask or have it brainstorm wild ideas, or roleplay different perspectives – all of which help to get my creative juices flowing. A friend would do the same – but, again, the low overhead nature of creativity hacking with a chatbot is very attractive to me. I can also spread my chatbot interactions around between the various AI chatbots. They’ll bring different perspectives, just like a group of my friends might. I might also ask a chatbot to help me think about an idea from the perspective of a particular historical figure (e.g., “what would Steve Jobs say about this idea?”).
I’m increasingly finding the benefits of this chatbot approach helping me in my creative work. For example, while writing this blog post, I asked for a critique of it from one of the chatbots. Over a few interactions, I was able to gain some new insights to include which hopefully made it even better.
Update: this morning Andrew Chen posted a great article titled “How I use AI when blogging and writing” which explores his experiences using AI chatbots to help with blog posts, generating topic ideas/questions, and even starting a book outline. Definitely worth reading!
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