Tools For Thought

In the most practical sense, we are now much less limited by ideas than ever before. Even people who don’t consider themselves creative now have access to a machine that will generate innovative concepts that beat those of most humans (though not the most creative ones). Where previously, there were only a few people who had the ability to come up ... See more

Charles Broskoski: Where does your impulse to organize come from?

Damon Zucconi: It’s less an impulse to organize and more an impulse to locate productive structures that I could work within. I’ve always had this sense that if you build a container for something, you will make things to fill it. What I frequently do is try to figure out different co... See more

Expand the diversity of building blocks . As Goldberg puts it, diversity is a necessary condition of selectorecombinative success. The broader our ecology of notes, the greater the combinatorial possibility.

• In what ways might we increase the diversity of our notes?


• How might we connect notes laterally, across topic boundaries?

The model was helpful—but only to an extent. They found that while AI improved the output of less creative writers, it made little difference to the quality of the stories produced by writers who were already creative.